John Joyner oral history transcript

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INTERVIEW WITH JOHN JOYNER
BY GEORGE GENTRY MAY 15, 2003
MR. JOYNER: My name is John Robert Joyner. J-O-Y-N-E-R.
MR. GENTRY: Tell everyone where we are today, conducting this interview.
MR. JOYNER: We are in the Pine Grove section; we call it, of Pierce County.
MR. GENTRY: And what is that near?
MR. JOYNER: That’s near Blackshear, in the State of Georgia.
MR. GENTRY: Do you mind telling us how old you are, and when you were born?
MR. JOYNER: I was born the 25th day of November in 1911.
MR. GENTRY: And where were you born?
MR. JOYNER: I was born in Folkston. We didn’t live there. My mother was visiting
my father’s family when I was born. She lived in Waycross [Georgia]. My father, was,
well, I don’t know if this is the right time to say it…
MR. GENTRY: Yeah, go ahead, it’s fine.
MR. JOYNER: My father was, I believe the first paid Fire Chief in Waycross. I wasn’t
born yet. It was in 1910, I believe, when he was made Chief.
MR. GENTRY: I guess that era in this part of the country was when the railroad had
just come through and opened it up for timber?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. And the north and south railroad and the east and west railroads
crossed at Waycross. That was a crossing of the ways. That’s where it got its name of
course. My family was connected with the Baileys. My mother’s first husband was
Theodore Bailey. He was a Dentist I believe. Sometime later, they were divorced and she
married my father who was James Mitchell Joyner.
MR. GENTRY: And the Joyner name is that of English dissent?
MR. JOYNER: They were from England. He arrived at Fort Fredericka on St. Simon’s
Island. In history, there is one of the lots in this town of Fredericka that was owned by a
man named John Joyner. My aunts told me when I was a boy that we had people who
were born at Fredericka. It’s a town that [General] Oglethorpe had built in that Fort to
guard against the Spanish intrusion into Georgia.
MR. GENTRY: So you can trace your family, as best you can tell, back to the settling of
Georgia by Oglethorpe?
MR. JOYNER: Yes sir, we are. There is a river island over in Wayne County, near
Jesup named Joyner’s Island. There is another place in there, where my grandfather was
born and raised right across the river from Joyner’s Island. It was deeded to them by the
King of England. That’s the way a lot of people got their land back in those days. They
were pretty good pieces of land too. But that’s beautiful country up and down that
Altamaha River.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s jump now to 1911, you were born in Folkston. Can you describe
your earliest recollections of not only Folkston, but also the Okefenokee and Waycross
area around the Swamp; this coastal plain area? What are your earliest recollections of
what it looked like compared to now? What kind of a habitat was this?
MR. JOYNER: Back in those days cattle and hogs and all ran free range. They were just
loose. We’d get out late in the evening and call the hogs. They could hear you from four
or five miles down in the creek swamps and places. They’d come up for their feed. Of
course hogs had their own way of eating. They hand a little intelligence too, because
they’d fight for the low end of the trough. People would save their dishwater and food
scraps and make a slop out of it. Of course at the low end of the trough it was deeper.
You had more to eat. And the hogs would fight over that end of the trough.
MR. GENTRY: So you had cattle and hogs and other livestock just running free? It’s
kind of like the open range of the west?
MR. JOYNER: That’s exactly what it was. Just the same way. Back in, oh good night,
I forget the times, but I think Roosevelt was President; Franklin Roosevelt, and the
farmers out west had a terrible drought out there. The government, to keep everybody
from going broke bought a lot of cattle from those people out west and shipped them
down to south Georgia and probably other states. They shipped just hundreds of head of
cattle down here and they brought that “screw worm”, we called it with them. It just
about devastated everything that we had. Because those screwworm flies would lay their
eggs on the other animals, you know. And if there was a sore spot or whatever, they’d
just bore right down into the skin. Finally, and especially in sheep when they turned
sheep out, you couldn’t see the flies soon enough to kill them. They’d kill the sheep.
MR. GENTRY: Back in that time when you were out just walking in the woods or riding
through the woods, however you got about as a young person, what did the land look
like? Was it all pine trees?
MR. JOYNER: It was pine trees and wire grass.
MR. GENTRY: Well what kind of pine trees?
MR. JOYNER: They were mostly slash pine; it’s the same ones that we have now. But
there’s what they call Loblolly now. We called them Black Pine in those days. It
wouldn’t do for turpentine because it just didn’t run the sap that the slash pine did. Slash
pine of course, they’d contract with some man and his family to work say ten thousand
cups on it. They had a metal tool with about a five or six pound weight on one end of it.
And they’d strike across the bark of the tree and knock it down a layer. Then they do the
same on the other side so that you had a “V” shaped face on that tree. It wasn’t a
pronounced V but anyhow, that’s the way it was. They would mold an apron up against
the tree on each side of that face and hang a cup under it. They’d just drive a thirty or
forty penny spike under the cup, slip it up under that metal and the pine gum would run
down in the cup. Approximately once a month they would take the barrels and put out
in the woods. They’d take a dip bucket, we called it, and scoop out the pine tar in a
bucket and tote it to the barrel and dump into there. It seems like the barrel was always a
mile and a half too far! You had to tote that bucket and it was just all a man could do, to
do a real days work out in the turpentine woods.
MR. GENTRY: Was that done in the middle of the summertime?
MR. JOYNER: It was done in the summertime, of course, when the sap was running. In
the wintertime, the faces grew up. I’ve seen faces that would be up twelve or fifteen feet.
But then they’d get to the point where you don’t have much gum running because it
sticks to that face as it comes down and dries. You had to be real careful of woods fires
because turpentine burns like gasoline, you know, or worse. They’d hire a bunch of
people to get out there with hoes and weed around the tree to cut the wiregrass away
from each pine tree. That was wintertime work. My uncle was a turpentine man. He
had is own still out in back of his house in Folkston. He’d lease timber from around.
MR. GENTRY: What were they using all of that turpentine for back then?
MR. JOYNER: Oh lord; they used the resin for all kinds of things! I don’t know what, I
guess in manufacturing stuff, I don’t know what else. But the spirits of turpentine, of
course, we used it as a medicine. I remember one time some boys and I were going one
time in a Model A sedan to the river to go swimming. Back in those days it was free
country and there was grass on the roads. The shoulders of the highways had cattle on
them all of the time. You had to be careful or you’d wreck with the cows. There was a
cow with her backend up on the edge of the road and her front feet were down in the
ditch. She was leaning over. I had my arm kind of out the window by the elbow. I told
the guy to pull over that way and I would catch her by the tail, just playing. But the boy
got too close and I stuck my arm out like I was gonna catch her by the tail and I actually
hit the cow on the hip and it drove my arm up against the back of the window. It took
the hide and all off of it back there. Well, they carried me on back to town because it was
bleeding a little bit. I had to walk four miles to home out to Trader’s Hill. I walked by a
turpentine still and they were running off, or what they called “taking off a charge”. They
were running the turpentine into a barrel. It was coming out of the still. It was still
warm. It was being condensed. It was coming down into the barrel, and I stuck my arm
down in the barrel of hot turpentine; all the way up to here. I held it there for three or
four minutes. When I got home, my arm wasn’t sore at all. It just healed right up with no
problem. It was pretty good lick that hit it there.
MR. GENTRY: I want to go back to the cattle and livestock running free; but were you
old enough at that time, or were you aware of any kind of damage to the environment at
that time because of that?
MR. JOYNER: No. I found nothing wrong with it. The woods were open in those
days. You could see through the woods. You didn’t have all that underbrush because it
was burnt off every year. The fires were low, it was just grass burning. Every once in a
while a tree would catch but even if it burned ‘til it burned out, it didn’t burn the tree
down or anything.
MR. GENTRY: Were those natural fires, or what?
MR. JOYNER: Well, they could be natural. But the farmers would carefully burn all
around out there were their cows used, that called it. That green grass would come up and
the cows begin to get some nourishment out of it. But just wiregrass in itself, old dry
wiregrass, is just that; wire. It looks like and feels like it. The cows won’t eat it. They
can’t get any nourishment out of it anyhow. It was burnt off every year. It keeps all the
scrub down. But now, if the fire gets out in the woods, it’ll burn up half a million dollars
worth of timber before you can get it stopped. Because all that brush is grown up you
know. You can just look out around here and see it. But there’d be thousands and
thousand of robins. They’d coming down every year to these burned off woods. They
could eat the cooked insects and all like that you know. But there would just be crowds
of the woods. You could hear them.
MR. GENTRY: I wonder where the farmers learned to burn the woods like that? Do
you suppose they learned that from the Native Americans that lived in this part of the
country?
MR. JOYNER: I don’t see why they had to learn it from anybody. It just looks like
common sense. They burned it off and got tender grass when they did that. The cows
begin to get a little fat.
MR. GENTRY: So who come along with this bright idea to stop all the burning?
MR. JOYNER: Oh boy, I don’t know. I just have no idea, but there was signs all up
around everywhere. “You can grow soft timber in forty years if you keep fire out”. Of
course the pulp wood people, the big timber companies say that we’ve got more pine
trees now that we’ve ever had. That’s true but saplings is all in the world it is. There’s
no lumber to it. The trees that they cut, they might get two by fours or four by fours out
of it.
MR. GENTRY: Were those government signs that were up? Were they from the
Department of Agriculture?
MR. JOYNER: I think so. I’m not sure where they came from. But I know they were
from the timber service part of the government, or the state government. I guess it was
just the State of Georgia.
MR. GENTRY: So how did that turn out?
MR. JOYNER: Well we still got it. And what we’ve got now is just a jungle out there
and all the timber’s been cut off just about. It’s all saplings now. The fields have been
just abandoned you know, and they plant pine trees in it. I just enjoyed coming up. I
was a “one horse farmer”. I had a horse, and a milk cow. And we had several other cattle
in the woods. We could kill a beef if we wanted to. We killed hogs most of the time. We
butchered them out and had a smoke house. We had a hand pump on the back porch. It
was just the old-time way. The way they came in, very few houses were sealed on the
inside. You just had the outside boards overhead and around you.
MR. GENTRY: Were the woods prettier back then?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. It was open. You could see for half a mile through the woods.
Pine trees were all there. The weather was different back in those days. We had, in the
fall of the year we would pull the leaves off of the corn stalks while they were still green
and hang them up behind the ear of corn one right after another. Those corn leaves would
dry and we’d tit them in bundles and put them in the crib in the barn, to feed on. There’s
never been a better smelling feed than the fodder we called it. There would be ‘fodder
showers’ we called it. You could see white rain coming through the woods as a cloud
went over you know. But every time you’d pull fodder wanting it to get dry, then it was
the time of year when those fodder showers would come every afternoon just enough to
make you wait another day before you could get your leaves into the crib.
MR. GENTRY: You mean just regular rain showers coming through the woods?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes! It would be what we always called “white rain”. We didn’t
have telephones or electric lights or anything like that. But if you got in trouble you took
the old shotgun off of the door up there and fired three shots, evenly spaced. Then your
neighbors would come to you. People lived sometimes half a mile from their nearest
neighbor. You could get in a spot where you needed a neighbor every once in a while.
MR. GENTRY: I understand that they had this idea to stop the farmers from burning
and everything; the proscribed burning is what it’s called now. You took a job checking
on all of that?
MR. JOYNER: I took a job trying to keep the farmers and people from burning.
MR. GENTRY: Who was that with?
MR. JOYNER: That was with the County Commissioners of Charlton County. I
believe there were four Commissioners, and each one hired a man to ride his section.
They divided the county up like that. My mind just won’t work right or I could tell you
who the Commissioner was that worked for.
MR. GENTRY: Well, that’s probably not as important as getting you to describe what
your job was like. How did you go about doing it?
MR. JOYNER: I just rode through the woods, off of the roads, all back in among the
farms back in there. I remember one; the man’s name was Reese Rider. They were
supposed to be kind of rough people. I never found them that way. Any body I ever had
association with back out in the woods there was just good people. They went to church
and all that. Now and then you’d find somebody that’d kill you if you messed with him!
But they were all good people. On top of the fact that they stopped us from burning the
woods, then they had a law that said you had to have a fence around your field, to keep
the livestock out of your field.
MR. GENTRY: You mean out of the woods?
MR. JOYNER: No, out of your fields.
MR. GENTRY: Let me get this right, the livestock were running everywhere?
MR. JOYNER: The livestock were in the woods. You fenced in your corn patch, your
cornfields or whatever you farmed; the farming land, to keep all of the cattle out of your
field. But then they passed what they called the “no fence law”. You didn’t have to have
a fence around your field. And if my cattle got into your patch, and ate up your corn or
whatever, then I was liable for it. Because I had to keep the cattle fenced up then instead
of having to fence off the field. So what did that do? That stopped people from running
cattle in the woods. We don’t have cows out in the woods now.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back and talk about your job? How much did you get paid, if
you don’t mind me asking?
MR. JOYNER: I got paid $100.00 a month, which was a big salary, or wage back in
those days.
MR. GENTRY: What year was that?
MR. JOYNER: Oh boy, it was in the early 1930’s.
MR. GENTRY: That was good money!
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes! I worked a many a day for a dollar a day!
MR. GENTRY: You provided your own horse?
MR. JOYNER: I provided my own horse; feed and all. I got no benefits except that
$100.00 a month out of it, and I was tickled to death to get that.
MR. GENTRY: How far did you ride on that horse on a daily basis doing that?
MR. JOYNER: Well, I’d ride from Trader’s Hill to out there in the swamp and that was
about ten or twelve miles. I was supposed to ride from the time the grass dried until the
dew started falling; which was almost an impossibility to do. Sometimes the dew didn’t
start falling. They saw dew doesn’t fall, but I’ve seen it spatter on the car. It wasn’t
raining.
MR. GENTRY: So you mean that you had to ride from in the morning, when it got hot?
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: So, you were to ride your horse out from Trader’s Hill out to the
swamp from the time in the morning, maybe nine or ten o’clock maybe?
MR. JOYNER: I’d just get up at daylight and go to work as soon as I could get my horse
fed and eat some breakfast myself. I get astride and go on and be in the woods.
MR. GENTRY: I am trying to picture this in my mind. You are sitting on your horse.
You’ve probably got you some lunch packed, or something like that.
MR. JOYNER: Yeah, usually some smokehouse meat and baked sweet potatoes and
things like that.
MR. GENTRY: And you’ve probably got you a weapon of some type?
MR. JOYNER: Well, they wanted me to carry a gun, but I knew better that to take a gun
out there among those people. I wasn’t after shooting anybody, so I didn’t. They were
friends of mine, you know! I just didn’t want to make a war out of it.
MR. GENTRY: So you didn’t carry anything for rattlesnakes or anything like that?
MR. JOYNER: Oh no, I didn’t a gun with me at all.
MR. GENTRY: I just trying to kind of picture your day. We’re just going to kind of
walk through this. You got on your horse at daybreak, got you some smokehouse meat,
and you are unarmed and you set off riding on your horse.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right, and I’d kind of get in my mind where I wanted to ride that
day. I’ve been back in; this was in the season when farmers usually would begin to burn
off patches of woods.
MR. GENTRY: What time of the year was that?
MR. JOYNER: The time of the year was in the fall and winter. The grass would be
dead, and they’d burn it off. Then before warm weather came, that wiregrass would be
green and growing. The cows would begin to get a little fat on it you know.
MR. GENTRY: So the purpose of you riding out through the woods and doing this was
what?
MR. JOYNER: It was to keep people from burning the woods. The fact that there was
somebody looking for it out there would be a deterrent to keep the farmers from setting
the woods on fire. Most of the farmers wouldn’t do it, but you’ve always got some that
would you know.
MR. GENTRY: This was a County effort to stop burning so the timber would grow?
MR. JOYNER: That’s correct. That is right.
MR. GENTRY: Even to this day, that’s sort of a political question, I guess. Who
determined what was most important? The farmers had an interest in… It’s seems like
there was kind a struggle here, between the poor one horse farmers and the landowners.
Do you know what was going on there?
MR. JOYNER: In some instances it could be, and was, I am sure. But the agricultural
colleges, like the college at Tifton, they are studying all this all of the time. They come up
with the recommendations a lot of times and the counties will follow their
recommendations. Then they get up there and pass these little laws that the farmers have
to do.
MR. GENTRY: But the passing of that law to reduce the burning was in the interest of
someone in the County to produce more timber, is that correct?
MR. JOYNER: That’s right. That’s correct.
MR. GENTRY: Who were the one’s passing those laws?
MR. JOYNER: Your County Commissioners I guess. Unless it was the State
government that did it; the Forestry Departments and things like that.
MR. GENTRY: Was suppressing the burning at the expense of the small one horse
farmer?
MR. JOYNER: The small farmer didn’t have anything to feed his cattle on in the woods.
If you couldn’t burn the grass off, all you had was old oak scrub and stuff coming up in
the pine forest and the cows didn’t have anything to eat. They couldn’t eat just that.
They’d survive if a farmer could help them a little with feed or something. But it wasn’t,
you couldn’t just turn your cows out in the woods and let them go. They’d have their
calves raised out there just like they would in the west.
MR. GENTRY: Who did the woods belong to at that time?
MR. JOYNER: Usually around every little town there was maybe one or two families
that had the bank and had the dry good store and grocery store, if you sold anything you
had to sell to those places of business that were owned by the prominent families. If you
bought anything, you had to buy it from their store.
MR. GENTRY: So they owned most of that land?
MR. JOYNER: They owned most of that land, that’s right. Because they could by if
for, lord, I’ve seen it go for $12.00 an acre. They’d buy up every bit that they could get.
MR. GENTRY: I am trying to understand if this prevention of burning was their effort
to protect their land, their timberland from the local farmers who wanted just to let their
cattle run out there, and to burn.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: They perceived that as not a good thing. Now I understand. So your
riding on your horse, and your job is to ride around and let people know that you are
watching so they don’t burn, is that right?
MR. JOYNER: That’s right. Well let me tell you about my horse now.
MR. GENTRY: Okay, tell me about your horse.
MR. JOYNER: She was a four year old, bay, mare. And we hit it off, right in the
beginning; just like I do any animal. She got to the point to where she wouldn’t leave me.
And one time I had ridden her as fast as she could go to get to that CCC Camp to tell
them that I had found that little fire. It was going up the hill because it was down in the
creek bottom and it was burning. It hit that hill and the wind just carried it up. I couldn’t
put it out so I ran down to the camp and they came up with five or six canvas covered
Army trucks, because the CCC Camp was under the auspices of the Army. Those
people had big rubber flaps on a handle and they were beating out the fire with it. I had a
dip paddle from somewhere. I don’t know where I got it. But I was going from tree to
another. The fire was way up above my head, and I was throwing dirt on there on it
trying to get the fire off of the pine trees, which I was doing all right. Well, those people,
I don’t know there were forty or fifty men out there all yelling and whooping and
hollering and pulling the canvas covered trucks up. I was going from one burning “cat
face” we called them; from one burning tree to the other, throwing the dirt up. And that
horse, dragging her reins and looking over my shoulder, every tree I went to, she wouldn’t
leave me anywhere! We had a real close relationship. I remember plowing with another
man’s horse and he had my horse. He got through he row running, before I did. And he
stopped her and took her loose from the plow, did the chain traces up on the haines, did
his lines up and did them up across the haines and just turned her loose. I knew good and
well that if she got to the fence row, she was going to drop her head down to eat, pick
what she could find; that collar and haines and all was going to fall behind her ears and she
was gonna get one foot through it. I just stopped the horse that I was plowing, an old
gentle thing anyhow, and I went running across the field there. It was plowed ground and
I couldn’t go too fast. But I saw her rare up on her hind feet, and sure enough she had one
foot through the bite of the chain. I yelled at her and went running to her and she
dropped her head down and held that foot up like that, [demonstrating] until I got to her
all the way across the field! She stood right there. And when I got there she, we called it
“wickered” to me. I got her untangled and tied her up then where she couldn’t get her
head down. They can’t reason a lot. You think they can sometimes. She knew that I
was coming and if she’d be still I’d get her out of it. But all of those men whooping and
hollering and that mare following right along behind me from one tree to another. They
couldn’t believe that she was doing that through all of that noise and movement and
everything. Most horses would be five miles from there by then!
MR. GENTRY: A fellow just doesn’t get the kind of relationship out of a tractor or a
ATV these days.
MR. JOYNER: No, lord no! But I’ve always made pets out of every animal I ever had.
I had a black Lab, and I still say she spoke better English than I do! Because you could
talk to her and she would nod her head at you, almost.
MR. GENTRY: Okay, I am going to get us back on track now.
MR. JOYNER: Yes, get us back on track.
MR. GENTRY: You’re out riding through the woods from daybreak to sunset I guess.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: You’re covering ten, fifteen, twenty miles, is that about right?
MR. JOYNER: Well, that’s about right, there and back. I mean, a round trip. I’d be ten
or twelve miles back out there on the swamp; the old “Ok-fen-oak”. And sometimes I’d
be at the “landing” we called it; Camp Cornelia.
MR. GENTRY: What did you see and experience when visit some of these folks who
lived out there? Did they have any animosity towards you? Did they ever dislike you
because of what you were doing?
MR. JOYNER: No, they didn’t have any animosity towards the whole thing. They just
looked at it as another law that the “town people” had made, see. That’s what bothers
everybody; the people in town can’t understand the people living out there. Because
those people use the language and words and things that their ancestors did when they
moved over here. They came from England. They used the words ‘ever’ and ‘never’ in a
different way than we do. Instead of saying, “Did you ever see a cow down there back of
the field?”, the man would say, “Never a one.” They shortened it to “Nare a one”. Now,
the people in town have got it to where they say, “Nary a one”. It sounds like N-A-R-Y,
“nary a one”. But just looks funny to people who came up and know how it was to hear
people say, “Nar a one”. I could go on for weeks.
MR. GENTRY: Well now, you made me think of something. Did you ever hear the
term, “over yender”?
MR. JOYNER: Oh, well now up in the mountains you’d probably run into that kind of
thing. Because they are still speaking English from the parts of England where they came
from, which was usually these people were just common working people. They had little
difference in their words and all, just like we do in this country.
MR. GENTRY: So, “yender” wasn’t a South Georgia term?
MR. JOYNER: No, I’ve never heard that. Now, “yonder”, I’ve heard that. I hear
“yonder” a lot. But to say “yender” I don’t think I’ve heard that one.
MR. GENTRY: So you’re riding your horse out there and getting paid, $100 bucks a
month, big money…
MR. JOYNER: Big money!
MR. GENTRY: And you are getting along good with these folks. You are preventing
them from setting the woods on fire and all that sort of thing right? You probably got
invited in to have lunch on occasion?
MR. JOYNER: Many a time, many a time. They were just good plain, decent people.
If necessary they’d fight you, any one of them; men, women and all, but there was
nothing to fight about.
MR. GENTRY: What kind of family names might you have run across on your ride from
family to family? What were some of the names?
MR. JOYNER: Oh boy, it’s been so long ago.
MR. GENTRY: I bet you ran across some Chessers out there.
MR. JOYNER: Oh the Chessers were all in the swamp mostly. There were one or two
of them that built a house on the outside up in the edge of Folkston. Harry Chesser did,
I’m pretty sure. The Daddy of a lot of them; his name was, well here I go again. It’s one
of the big English names.
MR. GENTRY: Were you doing all of this riding around on the horse, help me refresh
my memory, was that in the 1930’s?
MR. JOYNER: That was in the 1930’s. Because I was married and had one or two
children. I married in 1934. And that’s when Mitchell was born.
MR. GENTRY: What do you remember about Camp Cornelia out there? What was that
like? Did you ever ride out there?
MR. JOYNER: Yes, I rode out there. Back in the days when they dug that canal and
saw that the water ran back in to the swamp instead of out it, they quit with the canal.
Now what did I start to say?
MR. GENTRY: You were going to tell me about Camp Cornelia.
MR. JOYNER: Camp Cornelia.
MR. GENTRY: Who was out there?
MR. JOYNER: In the beginning, I think they had sawmills out there. The Hebberd
family from Hebberdville bought the timber in the Okefenokee Swamp. Of course they
had lines in there. But anyhow, they bought the timber out there. Most of it was on
Billy’s Island, which was the biggest island in the swamp, I believe. They had a sawmill
and they finally ran a railroad out there to it from Hebberdville, it you know where that
is. It’s in the northwestern section of Waycross. It used to be called Hebberdville. There
was a big commissary up there. Hebbard Cypress Company. Now I’m lost again.
MR. GENTRY: Well, when you were riding around in the 1930’s, were they still
bringing big cypress trees out of there?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. I don’t know just exactly when they got through cutting the
cypress out of it.
MR. GENTRY: I was wondering if you saw a time where there were these huge pine
trees and huge cypress being brought out. We’ll never see them again.
MR. JOYNER: Yes, and we’ll never see them again because they cut cypress out that
that Okefenokee Swamp that was big trees when Columbus discovered this country!
Cypress grows slow. I don’t know, the pine trees is all at least second growth stuff. You
don’t see any old original pines any more. They were oh, that big around; huge trees.
And they had just two or three inches, it seems like, of what we called sap wood on the
outside. The rest of it was heart. It’s a permanent wood. I’ve tried to cut access to the
window weights in an old house that my mother had over in Waycross. It was built out
of that old heart pine and I just tore my chisels up trying to cut through a little one-inch
board!
MR. GENTRY: So when you were a kid, or later when you were riding and all of that,
did you still see some of that?
MR. JOYNER: Some of those big trees; you could see a few. You could see, well, there
was one of them standing down right here on my place you might say. It was on the road
between me and Mac Murray over there.
MR. GENTRY: Could you see them still being hauled out on the rail or what?
MR. JOYNER: No, they were hauling with trucks.
MR. GENTRY: But they were hauling out of the swamp?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. Now, out of the Okefenokee Swamp, I can remember a tram
road. The engine and train came right by my granddaddy’s fence. It was within thirty
feet of his fence where that train would go through there, and it was going to Camp
Cornelia I’m pretty sure. Hey son! This is my son John, he’s my oldest boy. This is
Mr. Gentry.
MR. GENTRY: You say it was going to Camp Cornelia. Would it be going to and from
hauling logs, or what?
MR. JOYNER: Yes, it would be going to and from and I can remember freight cars on it.
There would be four or five freight cars it seems like. But I actually don’t remember
seeing logs hauled out of there. Although I don’t know what the heck else they would
have hauled out, unless it was cut lumber. They might have done that because they had a
sawmill out there.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back to your horseback riding days. When did all that change?
When did somebody decide that they didn’t need you to do that anymore?
MR. JOYNER: Well, it was just one year that I rode. I could get off of her and climb up
into the fire tower and talk to the boy up there. I’d ask him what’s going on and all of
that. They could stop the fires. They had a compass right under the thing and by
triangulation they could pinpoint it and send somebody out to stop it. Of course there’s
this little matter of smoke too. It’s good to know where it’s burning because you’d get
down there and run into fences and all that kind of stuff.
MR. GENTRY: I heard back in those days all the little bits of smoke you might see from
out in that part of the country wasn’t necessarily from a forest fire or anything else.
MR. JOYNER: Yes, I know what you’re talking about. It was “happy water”. They
had to had a little of that along. That was pretty good. I was a teenager along in those
days, and I can remember the things we’d get in to. There were some people named
Coomer, over in Camden County. He made the best shine we had in the country. The
boys called that the “Five C” whiskey, you know. That was for, “Coomers Camden
County Cool Corn”! That was the Five-C brand, the best shine there was in the south or
anywhere around. They said that if you drank it out of a food jar you’d inhale it you
know. It would make you drunker, quicker. One time we had stopped; now there’s
another thing; we had stopped at what we called “Juke Joints”. Back in those days it was
juke joints. Somebody had a two quart jar about half full of shine, passing that around.
And I got hold of it and I took me two or three deep smells of it. I was trying it out. And
I took one swallow out of that jar and I rode home in what they called the rumble seat in
those days, of a Coupe. My old Model T Ford didn’t have a top on it or anything. It
was parked at a restaurant up there. The boys put me out and I drove that old Model T
into the double garage at my Aunt and Uncle’s who I was living with at the time, and I
couldn’t get out of my car. I knew doggoned well that if I opened that door I was going to
fall on my face! So I sat there until my Aunt and Uncle came. They said, ‘Why you
sitting out here in the car?” I said, “I’m drunk!” And my Aunt said, “Why, John
Robert!” But the bad part of it was my old religious Grandmother and Grandfather was
sleeping in my bedroom. They had put some quilts down on the floor and made what we
called a pallet for me to sleep on the floor. When I got in there, I wanted to sleep as far
away from those people as I possibly could! Because I felt like I smelled like a shine still
you know. I didn’t want them to know I was drunk. And that room was going round and
round. I put my foot against the bedstead to try to hold against that going around thing,
but that didn’t help a bit! I kept going round and round until I turned over on my
stomach. When I did that, everything kind of quietened off, and I really went to sleep
after that. But I found out, don’t try to lie flat on your back and sober up. It ain’t gonna
be. That was potent stuff boy!
MR. GENTRY: Was the Okefenokee known for that sort of thing?
MR. JOYNER: They made whiskey out there, some of the people did. I remember
some, I’ll think of the name in a minute. They were the boys that their mother called
them and told them that the bear was killing, or catching a hog down at the hog pen.
[End of tape #1]
MR. GENTRY: I think I’ve got just about all of that about the horseback riding out
there. What else sort of thing did you do that was related to the swamp? What did you
see, and know about that was related to the swamp?
MR. JOYNER: Well, I know that in dry weather that the thousands of fish congregated
in the Suwannee Canal. They’d come out of the lakes and get in that canal because the
water was deeper there of course. And people could go there and just catch forty or fifty
fish before we could turn around.
MR. GENTRY: When was this?
MR. JOYNER: Well, anytime. You could do it now I guess. Of course, you’ve been to
Camp Cornelia haven’t you? Did you say your daughter worked there?
MR. GENTRY: My wife.
MR. JOYNER: At Camp Cornelia?
MR. GENTRY: Well, I guess that is Camp Cornelia, or was. It’s out there at the
National Wildlife Refuge.
MR. JOYNER: Out from Folkston?
MR. GENTRY: Yeah. Was that Camp Cornelia out there?
MR. JOYNER: Yes. And that was named Cornelia was a daughter of one of the
Hebberds. It was named after a daughter of one of those people.
MR. GENTRY: You enjoyed fishing out there I guess?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes, we used to fish a lot in the Saint Mary’s River. There’s no
better fish in the world than that! When we would go swimming it in when I was a boy,
it was, and I have seen in written somewhere that it was the deepest river, compared to
it’s width of any river in America. There are places in it where you can’t find bottom.
We used to be swimming suits and all. We just shucked off and jumped in. But you
could swim out there in the middle of that river and turn down and swim down until you
hit a cold streak of water and just open your mouth and drink all of the water you wanted
and come up to the top. Old sailing ships used to come up the Saint Mary’s River to get
water for their ships, you know, for overseas. It had enough tannic acid in it. It’s kind of
a brown looking water. It’s colored because of the stuff that’s in there. But it would
keep. The water wouldn’t go bad on the sailing ships.
MR. GENTRY: I guess that acid was like a preservative.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s take about some of the critters that might have run across as a kid.
Was there any panthers out here?
MR. JOYNER: There was an occasional report of a panther or something being seen in
the swamp. I know that my cousin, who worked for Georgia Power Company liked to
hunt. And he lived right down there on the edge of the swamp. He would go hunting at
night with his dog, or dogs, whatever; and one night the dog was barking up a tree and he
had his bright light that he could set on the ground for working. He had his climbing
hooks on his legs. He shined that light up the tree and saw two eyes up there. He shot
up it, and he thought he had hit whatever it was. And had hung up there. He set his light
down on the ground so it would shine up in the tree and climbed up there. It was what
the old folks used to call a “tiger”. I have never seen one, but I’ve heard them describe it.
It’s a cat, a good bit bigger than a wildcat, which is the small cat in the woods.
MR. GENTRY: A Bobcat?
MR. JOYNER: The Bobcat is bigger than the wildcat. This thing was bigger than the
Bobcat. And it was black and white stripped like a tiger. I don’t know of the stripes
were fore and aft or aforeship [?], but they were stripes anyway. But that’s the only
report of panthers or cats.
MR. GENTRY: What about wolves?
MR. JOYNER: There were wolves in there when my people first moved here, I think,
but there were mighty few of them. They had tales that they would tell us about wolves
getting after somebody and them running to the house to get away from them; things like
that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What about trapping? Didn’t they used to trap for fur?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. They trapped. When I was a boy we used to set steel traps,
which is one of the cruelest things there is in the world for an animal. But we’d set traps.
It was a big deal for a boy to catch a coon, or a possum or something in the woods. We’d
catch one every once in a while. A lot of people, especially people in the swamp, they
would sell hides and things like that through the mail. They finally stopped all of that, or
were supposed to have stopped it.
MR. GENTRY: We say that it was cruel now. Can I assume that in that era when you
were a boy that no body thought about that as being cruel?
MR. JOYNER: Well, just the hide was more valuable than their feeling for the animal.
That’s all I can say.
MR. GENTRY: It’s called survival.
MR. JOYNER: There you go. They’ve actually known of coon, fox or whatever
gnawing his foot off to get away from that steel trap.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Daddy, when we lived out at Trader’s Hill out at the swamp there,
I remember you telling us about hearing what you figured was a cat or something that
sounded like it was prowling around the house.
MR. JOYNER: That was right out in front of the house. I had two little blue-ticked
puppies and I finally persuaded my wife to go with me in the woods at night. We’d gone
almost to the creek and just as we came back, my puppies struck a trail over there and
they went to tree’in right quick. That’s a little difference in the sound of their bark,
whenever they get them up a tree. I went running across there, yelling at her to come on
and she wouldn’t go with me that time. When I came back from that deal, I was getting
pretty close to the house and the puppies run out into the clump of plow meadows or
something out there. I could hear something growling in it. I kicked in the bushes a little
bit and it growled in. I called my puppies and got a hold of them and got them away
because I didn’t know if it was a wildcat. Those puppies were only a third grown and I
didn’t want them to get tangled up in there with something. But that thing ran out of
those bushes. I never did see what it was. It sounded like a bird flying. It sounded like it
was five or six feet above the ground. It went all the way around our house and over to
Frank Bryant’s house; our neighbor, a good ways over in the woods there. It was just
yelling, “Yow, Yow, Yow”. It was screaming kind of, all the time around there. I have no
idea what it was.
MR. GENTRY: In that time, it sounds like you were a lot closer to nature. Everybody
thinks that it’s ideal being close to nature, but there seemed to be some kind of danger
involved.
MR. JOYNER: Yeah, well, you could get yourself in trouble. Especially in the swamp.
They had gators, alligators in there. And I think there was a panther or two. They said
that an alligator would try to knock a dog out of your boat. I don’t know why he would
want to pick on dogs. Maybe it was a delicacy to him, I don’t know. But you could get
bit by them too, if you didn’t watch what you were doing.
MR. GENTRY: Snakes?
MR. JOYNER: Oh, snakes are everywhere. I’ve killed rattlers in my right here in my
front yard five or six feet long; big Diamondbacks.
MR. GENTRY: Back in the 1930’s and 1940’s and that era back through there; was
every snake a dangerous snake in people’s minds, or in your mind?
MR. JOYNER: No, not every snake. No.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Tell him about the time you got snake bit Daddy.
MR. JOYNER: I can’t remember that.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: You said that you did everything wrong that there was to do.
MR. JOYNER: Oh, that was down in Bartow, Florida. My brother had bought a truck
farm down there and I had moved my wife and that baby right there. [Referring to now
grown daughter] She slept on a pillow all the way down to Bartow, or Ft. Meade from
Folkston. But I had gone down to the back of the field trying to get fat wood for
splinters to build a fire. Something hit me on the foot and it kept hurting more and more.
I had some wood on my shoulder; long pieces. I threw them across the fence and crawled
back over to the cleared ground. I looked at my foot and there’s two drops of blood
sitting there. I figured a little brown rattler or something had bit me. When I got to the
house, my leg was hurting; all up in my knee and all. I didn’t have any whiskey down
there, which is supposed to be a snakebite remedy. But somebody got some from
somewhere, which is the wrong thing to do, because that makes your blood go through
your body faster. Of course, I guess if you get yourself totally stiff with it, it might over
do the bite, but anyway, they finally got me to a doctor. At first, I cut it, or Jim did, or
somebody did; cut it across and stuck it down in a bucket of kerosene of something.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: You said that after you drank a little of that whiskey you wouldn’t
care if the yard was full of snakes! Tell about the time at Trader’s Hill near the swamp
when you were walking with your Granddaddy down a path, and you were walking
behind him that time and he stepped on that snake. Tell about that. You remember that?
MR. JOYNER: He was whistling a church song, he hollered at me. I remember we were
dipping some gum then. He had his pine trees cut. He said, “Son, I think I’ll walk down
to the river and see how the tide is”. That river makes tides all the way to Trader’s Hill.
We’d go fishing later on. He was going around what we called a “bay head”, a low spot. I
saw him just jumping up and his feet going high, still whistling that church song, whatever
it was. When he came back and said, “Well the tide looks like it’s about right. We’ll go
whenever you get ready.” I said, “Granddaddy, what in the world were you jumping so
high for out there a while ago?” He said, “Well, I stepped right across a Black Snake and
it kind of scared me. Every time I jumped off of him to let him run, I’d come down, the
snake would get tangled up in my legs again.” He never quit whistling at all. Just jumping
up and down and whistling. He was in his eighties then I guess! He was 102 when he
died.
MR. GENTRY: Talk a little bit of the perception at that time of folks who lived in this
part of the country about snakes. Now we have endangered snakes.
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. Don’t want the snakes! They’ll run out of town! That would
be a bad thing. I don’t get it sometimes, but I love everything all the time. It doesn’t
make any difference; I can just smile about all of it.
MR. GENTRY: But I take that there was never any consideration when you were
growing up, or even to this day, that there should be a concern for any of the snakes that
might be endangered.
MR. JOYNER: Actually, I guess they have their place in the environment. I know they
eat rats and maybe we’d all be overrun with rats if we didn’t have snakes. I don’t know.
Well, mice or wood rats or whatever. I never heard anybody being worried about one
species being extinct or anything like that.
MR. GENTRY: What about the same issue about the Red Cockaded Woodpecker? Are
you familiar with that species of woodpecker?
MR. JOYNER: You’re talking about the pileated one. They called them “pill-e-ated”.
But that means haired, and they’ve got that cockade up there.
MR. GENTRY: Well now, there’s one particular species of woodpecker. It a little one
about that big.
MR. JOYNER: I’ve seen the red headed woodpecker many times.
MR. GENTRY: Back in the 1930’s and 1940’s evidently that wasn’t any sort of an
issue; that you might ever have a woodpecker that was ever in danger, or anything like
that?
MR. JOYNER: I never heard of that.
MR. GENTRY: Was there any concept, or did anybody ever think about in those times;
and I don’t mean for this to come across as critical, I am just trying to get the mindset,
and the way yall were thinking about things.
MR. JOYNER: I understand.
MR. GENTRY: And the way I was thinking about things. In fact, we used to eat gopher
soup whenever I was a kid.
MR. JOYNER: What was the mindset of people back in that era about animals that might
disappear forever, go extinct?
MR. JOYNER: I don’t know whether we had environmentalists or whoever worried
about it in those days. We didn’t see a lot of it. Time goes by so fast ‘til I can’t
remember a certain period of time; what the mindset was. But it seems like in maybe the
past ten years we’ve run into more of that extinct thing than we did before. I don’t think
that there was a lot of worrying about anything going extinct back in say the 1930’s and
1940’s.
MR. GENTRY: Did you ever eat gopher stew, or gopher soup?
MR. JOYNER: I’ve eaten gopher, in a stew one time. But the people in Jacksonville,
they said that they’d pay for their groceries with gopher and get little gophers in change.
They’d have big gophers stews. I worked in the shipyard during the War. I was the only
one in the family that didn’t get in there.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s just clarify; we’re talking about the Gopher Tortoise.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right. Not the animal.
MR. GENTRY: Back in that era it was quite common to catch them and take them to
market.
MR. JOYNER: Out in south Georgia, we didn’t do that. But the people in north Florida
did it a lot. They’d have big parties and have gopher stew. I don’t know how else they
cooked them. But the one’s that I ate was on the banks of the St. Mary’s River down at
Moody Landing. I had these two boys from Jacksonville with me. We waded the boat
and went up the canal. I saw an old soft-shelled turtle; it was laying eggs up there. Good
nights, it was that big around! There were several of them up there on the bank, on a flat
place. When we pulled up there they began to run. But there were some of them still
working down to the hole. You know, they would dig a hole and turn around to lay the
eggs and then cover it up and leave it that way. It was just like they used to do in the
ocean when we used to go egg hunting at night; turtle egg hunting. You could get fifty or
seventy-five eggs out of some those holes that the old sea turtles had laid.
MR. GENTRY: Where was that?
MR. JOYNER: I was in Folkston because I wanted to be at Folkston because my
Grandmother and Grandfather lived alone out near Traders Hill. Spanish Creek ran in to
the river down there. The River ran this way and their house was in here. You could
walk down to the creek or you could walk down to the river. If you heard a car, you
knew it was coming to your house. They were alone out there and it was just hog heaven
for me!
MR. GENTRY: But you must have went over to the coast for the sea turtle eggs?
MR. JOYNER: Okay, that’s…We lived in Orlando. That’s were I went to all my
schooling, with the exception of one year up at North Carolina; Brevard, North Carolina.
That school is still there I understand.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Isn’t it a military school?
MR. JOYNER: No, it’s not a military school. I went to military school down in
Orlando. The man who came down and started the school; he didn’t last but a year or
two. He didn’t have any money to start with. But it was old Colonel Crawford Hulvey.
They were from the Tennessee Military Institute. They came down to Florida to start it.
But we had a couple of years of good training down there.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: You were a bugler weren’t you?
MR. JOYNER: I was a bugler.
MR. GENTRY: You must have gone over to the Atlantic coast?
MR. JOYNER: We did. We went to Daytona Beach. I had a brother who lived at
Daytona. We’d go over and visit him. We’d put on our swimsuits and just put a shirt on
over our shoulders and stay on the beach all day, every day. We were just kids then. I
don’t know; I was in my very earliest teens I guess.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back to the Okefenokee. I’m getting off the subject. Is there
anything else about the Okefenokee, or that part of the country? There was turpentine
we talked about, and timber, all that sort of stuff. I think we’ve just about got all of that.
But what else have you got to tell me?
MR. JOYNER: I was gonna tell you that my Uncle had an Ox team. And he would haul
those enormous logs; for this part of the country anyhow, to the sawmill. Well, thing
right here is off of one of his steers. [Showing an artifact] It’s a cow horn. He’s got this
thing on it. [Mr. Joyner demonstrates that he can blow into it with a mouthpiece, which
is attached.]
MR. GENTRY: Show me that again. Where did you say that came from?
MR. JOYNER: This is off of, I am assuming, off of one of his oxen. They’d cut the
horns off of them. It looks to me like they’d kill them doing it because it leaves a hole in
their skull up there. Some how or another it heals over. But he made a horn to blow for
his dogs or whatever out of this. This is, oh lord, a good hundred years old. It’s still as
solid as it could be.
MR. GENTRY: How’s it work?
MR. JOYNER: You just blow through it to call the dogs or whatever. [Demonstrates
again] People used to use them to call their dogs up when they had a pack of dogs out
hunting foxes or whatever.
MR. GENTRY: Okay. What else have we got over here? Did you have some books that
you were going to show me?
MR. JOYNER: Yeah, I was gonna let you see some of these things. I almost have to
have you sitting here by me.
MR. GENTRY: That’s okay; I’m kind of familiar with that Foxfire book. What have
you got in there?
MR. JOYNER: It’s the same thing.
MR. GENTRY: It shows you a lot of the old ways of doing stuff?
MR. JOYNER: The old ways of doing stuff.
MR. GENTRY: I am primarily more interested in…
MR. JOYNER: In the swamp.
MR. GENTRY: …in your history and that. Do you have any photos of you back in the
horseback days, or anything like that?
MR. JOYNER: I don’t believe I’ve got a single picture of me on that kind of thing.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Can you tell about the saddle coming in the mail to ride that horse
in the swamp?
MR. JOYNER: [Laughing] Yeah!
MR. GENTRY: You had a Sears and Roebuck saddle, huh?
MR. JOYNER: A Sears and Roebuck saddle. It was made by Bonner Allen up on
Georgia which makes a lot of the western saddles.
MR. GENTRY: You know what? You might have the answer to this question. What
does the term “Georgia cracker” mean?
MR. JOYNER: Oh, well, I’ve got tale, and theory about that. When Oglethorpe first; of
course, he built the colony at Savannah to begin with. They was afraid that the Spanish
were gonna come up and take the Georgia colonies. So they built a fort of St. Simon’s
Island. They called it Fort Fredericka, and they had a town on there too, which was the
town of Fredericka of course. Now, here my minds gone again!
MR. GENTRY: We were talking about where the term “Georgia cracker” came from.
MR. JOYNER: Okay. He needed somebody to teach his people how to be soldiers. He
had a good many men but he wanted a troop or a company of crack troops down there to
train his men. They had to house them in the city’s private homes. They didn’t have
any big barracks built for them. So they said, and this is just from conjecture of what I’ve
heard along and along; that this women said, “They’ve got three soldiers in my house!”
And people would ask her, “Well, are they our boys, or are they those crackers?” They
had a crack company that come in, they called them crackers. That’s the way they’ve
always been known, as Georgia Crackers. People in South Carolina would say, “If we
had some of those Georgia Crackers up here, we could do…” so and so; I don’t know.
But that’s feasible. It could have been done just that way. When you go back to the old
people, they had it back in those days too. And you hope that somewhere down the line
it comes from the truth somewhere. But I don’t know, they do that just like they do the
words that we use, and things like that.
MR. GENTRY: I am going to change the subject a little bit, but back to the swamp and
my purpose for talking to you. Was these woods that were here then, and the swamp
and all of that that was pretty essential to the survival of everybody down here wasn’t it?
MR. JOYNER: People farmed, and they had smoke houses and tater banks and
corncribs. They lived like that. They killed their own meat and knew how to cure it, and
all that stuff, you know.
JOHN JOYNER, JR. They hunted out of season if they had to after they started the
seasons.
MR. JOYNER: Oh yeah, they hunted. My poor old Granddad he came up living in the
woods and killing animals as he wanted, and needed to eat. I was telling the kids the other
day, I’ve seen my Grandmother when she’d hear Granddad’s gun fire down there in
branch or creek or somewhere; she’d get up and go put the frying pan on. She knew he’d
there at the house with something to eat! Some meat, you know. Usually it was squirrels
or rabbit or something like that. Sometimes it would be birds; quail and turkeys. Lord,
I’ve followed behind my Granddad hunting turkeys when my eyes were level with the
small of back, until I could see over his head! Then I had a gun of my own.
MR. GENTRY: Well wasn’t there a period of time in like the 1930’s and 1940’s when
almost all of the turkeys and deer were shot out in this part of the country?
MR. JOYNER: Boy, they sure were! If you saw a deer that was, well, you just didn’t
see big deer out in the woods up in here, or in Charlton County anyway. The people in
the swamp used to kill them and eat them all of the time. I guess it didn’t make any
difference whether they were killing a buck, Bye son, [John Jr. leaving], or a doe. A lot of
the time, I feel like they would eat the choice meat and feed the rest of it to the dogs. But
I saw somebody offer a man a hundred dollars for a black bear cub in Folkston, at a
Service station. He had that little cub; a little bitty fellow, and this tourist came through
and offered him a hundred dollars for him.
MR. GENTRY: When was that?
MR. JOYNER: Oh lord, I don’t know what year it was, but I was a grown boy, a young
man. But bears were all gone too. They stopped people from going in the swamp with
guns. The wildlife came right back.
MR. GENTRY: But there was a period of time, was it like the 1930’s or 1940’s that the
gators and the bear and deer and all that were pretty much shot out?
MR. JOYNER: They were. I know that the gators that were in the rivers and creeks and
things in south Georgia were just gone. All of them. You never did see a deer or hardly
any other animal out in the open. But now, out in back of her house, we saw fifteen or
twenty turkeys just the other day, wild turkeys. My Granddad and I used to hunt them
all of the time.
MR. GENTRY: So during the period of time when you were in your twenties and
thirties is when game, big animals like that, were pretty scarce.
MR. JOYNER: They were scarce.
MR. GENTRY: What changed that? What brought them back?
MR. JOYNER: Well, the environmentalist; that’s what I call them. I don’t know if that’s
the right name for these people who handle all of this livestock stuff or not. But anyhow,
they just began to make an effort about stopping the killing of the few deer that was left
in there so they could have grandchildren you know. They can still be counted. The deer
begin to come now so that…I can’t grow watermelons out here, the deer will eat up the
melons themselves! They’ll just eat a melon and go to the next one and eat in it a little bit
and just ruin your melon patch.
MR. GENTRY: So it sounds like to me in that period of the 1930’s, and here again, I
certainly don’t mean to criticize because people were probably about starving to death. It
sounds like they were just killing off stuff to survive.
MR. JOYNER: It could have been. People had farms, and they had plenty to eat. Meat
is something that they could raise themselves. Squirrels and rabbits and things like that
are as prolific as they can be. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a scarcity of rabbits and
squirrels.
MR. GENTRY: Do you think it was that people were hunting just for the fun of
hunting?
MR. JOYNER: Well, that’s one of the things. They would bring in foxes and coyotes
and everything else and turn them loose out here, so that they’d have something to run.
Well those things would breed and have young. It wouldn’t be long before it would be
like it is now; you can’t plant anything in the garden, the blooming deer will eat it up!
MR. GENTRY: It sounds like to me that what you’re saying; and I don’t want to put
words in your mouth, that it was like unregulated hunting. They were just allowed to do
whatever they wanted to; that was the problem.
MR. JOYNER: That is right. That’s what will kill out everything. A lot of people just
for sport they’ll house twelve or fifteen head of dogs all year to get to run them four or
five times during some season or other. They’ll have them in concrete floored pens with
boxes or sections so they can get out of the rain. But so far as the cold weather and that
kind of stuff is concerned; I guess some of them might have some heat out there, but most
of them didn’t have. The dogs just took it, that’s all. That has always bothered me. I
wouldn’t have dogs shut up in a kennel; and then go get your dogs once a month and turn
them out. A god can’t reason, he’ll run himself to death! He’s been just sitting for a
month, and then take him out in cold weather and run him to death. They’ll run ‘til they
fall you know.
MR. GENTRY: Would they be chasing deer?
MR. JOYNER: Chasing deer, chasing fox, chasing coyotes. They get on an old red fox;
he’ll quit the land. He’ll go twenty-five or thirty miles, and your dog’s right behind him
all of that time! The gray fox will circle round and round in here. They put a few red
foxes in here, but they didn’t like them much. It ruined their dogs.
MR. JOYNER’ S DAUGHTER: A lot of out of state people would come and hunt.
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes! Lord a mercy, people from out of state. A lot of Florida
people would come up and hunt. So I don’t know, for a while everything was good. And
then all of a sudden everything was bad. There’s no deer. People were catching quail in
traps. I had to stop them out here from trapping quail. That’s against the law to start
with. I just like to see the quail go through the yard, you know. They ain’t hurting
nothing! It’s fun.
MR. GENTRY: It sounds like you just can’t let people do whatever they want to
whenever it comes to …
MR. JOYNER: There’s got to be some regulation somewhere down because if
everybody thought the same way you could kind of adjust their thinking. But you can’t
do it. It’s what they want now. It’s what they want to do. They just like the fun or the
sport out of it. I just think too much of the animals. I like to see them. We’ve got bird’s
grandmother out there now. I feed them every day. We’ve got blue jays, red birds, a blue
birds. And we’ve got a finch feeder. Marilyn just put finch feeders out there for them
today. And doves, big doves and the little dove. One of my big objections is the way the
Audubon Society and everybody else talks about the Southern Mocking Bird. They
ought to name the thing the American Nightingale. That’s what they ought to do, but
they don’ t you know. They write that all it does is mock other birds with just now and
then a phrase of it’s own put in. That’s not the way it is. Mocking bird doesn’t sing the
same song every day like other birds. It’s the rooster that’s singing while the old lady is
sitting on the eggs in the nest. They’ve got plenty to eat, and he’s as happy as he can be.
He’ll sit out here right next…I’ve got a tape of him somewhere, and you’ve never heard
such singing in your life! He’d jump up and turn a somersault and land back on top of the
pine tree. It’s just a marvel to watch them and listen to them! But to say that it just
mocks other birds; I’ve heard people say that, “Oh it just mocks other birds”; that’s not
so. That’s not the way it is at all! I can’t get the world educated as hard as I try!
MR. JOYNER’S DAUGHTER: Daddy, go back to the woods; back at Trader’s Hill and
back around there and the holler.
MR. JOYNER: Oh lord, yeah! Everybody had his own holler, they pronounced it h-o-l-l-
e-r, “holler”, a woods holler. He’d be around the house somewhere, and pretty soon
he’d be way back in the back woods over there. And he’d go “Day, Day, Daaaayaooo”
and things like that you know! [Demonstrating a field holler that a person would make]
And you could hear it for two miles! We went to a house one time and asked for this
young woman’s husband. She said that he was right back there in the fields, “I heard him
holler just a few minutes ago”. So we knew where he was and we could drive down there
and find him. That was the purpose of it; to let you know, “Here I am”, or “I’m
coming!” Everybody had his own. Some of them were real pretty. Some were not. But
most of them had a melodious sound that they made.
MR. GENTRY: Did you have one?
MR. JOYNER: I couldn’t have one because my mother got the idea one time that I had
adenoids and she carried me down to a doctor’s office. He put me on the table and put
me to sleep with what we called in those days “laughing gas”. And I dreamed I saw a
little colored girl about six inches high on the horizon. Over there, just dancing up a
breeze! I was right on a cliff. All of a sudden I fell off that cliff and put my hands up and
got them in something and crawled back up of the cliff where the girl was dancing on the
horizon over there. It was just so funny to me. I just started laughing. And when I came
to, I woke up on the table there; the doctor said he’d had kind of a time with me. He said
I fell off of the table and got back up on it and just went to laughing like everything. He
said that he expected to have that with the gas. But I think that must be the way the gas
works or something. It gives you something to laugh at.
MR. GENTRY: Well, what I want to hear is what that holler sounded like. You may
remember one from somebody.
MR. JOYNER’S DAUGHTER: You know, the Chessers, the Mosells. You know that
tape that we’ve got?
MR. JOYNER: Yeah but that was just driving cattle, “HEYYYYY-HE” and
“HOOOOO-HE”! Like that, you know. Just keeping your cows going, just knowing
that you’re back there, and keep going. So that’s all there was to that.
MR. GENTRY: What about your signals to a mule or a horse?
MR. JOYNER: Well, just “Gee” and “Haw” and “Whoa” and “Get up” or whatever.
[Makes a tooth and tongue clicking sound] All you had to do. I had a bridle one time and
the old bits just wore out. So I just took the bridle off of the horse and hung them up on
the haines and went on plowing just talking to her. I’d get to the end of the row, if I said,
“Come in” she’d come to the left. If I said, “Come around”, she’d go to the right. And in
plowing her, if she was walking too far to the left, you could say, “Gee Molly” and she’d
step over, a little closer to the right you know. And if she was too close up and stepping
on your corn or whatever you could say, “Haw”, and she’d ease back out to the left. You
do that by just tapping on the rein when you’re plowing. You just say, “Haw” and tap
on that rein. You don’t turn her head like everybody tries to do. Like I say, I can’t
educate the whole world! If you just tap it, and by the time you say, “Haw” she’ll turn
her head that way, and just naturally step just a tad; that’s all you want her to do to keep
from covering up your corn and stuff. But that’s the way you controlled them, with Gee,
Haw, Whoa, Get Up, or Come in, Come around, back.
MR. JOYNER’S DAUGHTER: What was on that tape that we got from the National
Archives?

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN JOYNER
BY GEORGE GENTRY MAY 15, 2003
MR. JOYNER: My name is John Robert Joyner. J-O-Y-N-E-R.
MR. GENTRY: Tell everyone where we are today, conducting this interview.
MR. JOYNER: We are in the Pine Grove section; we call it, of Pierce County.
MR. GENTRY: And what is that near?
MR. JOYNER: That’s near Blackshear, in the State of Georgia.
MR. GENTRY: Do you mind telling us how old you are, and when you were born?
MR. JOYNER: I was born the 25th day of November in 1911.
MR. GENTRY: And where were you born?
MR. JOYNER: I was born in Folkston. We didn’t live there. My mother was visiting
my father’s family when I was born. She lived in Waycross [Georgia]. My father, was,
well, I don’t know if this is the right time to say it…
MR. GENTRY: Yeah, go ahead, it’s fine.
MR. JOYNER: My father was, I believe the first paid Fire Chief in Waycross. I wasn’t
born yet. It was in 1910, I believe, when he was made Chief.
MR. GENTRY: I guess that era in this part of the country was when the railroad had
just come through and opened it up for timber?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. And the north and south railroad and the east and west railroads
crossed at Waycross. That was a crossing of the ways. That’s where it got its name of
course. My family was connected with the Baileys. My mother’s first husband was
Theodore Bailey. He was a Dentist I believe. Sometime later, they were divorced and she
married my father who was James Mitchell Joyner.
MR. GENTRY: And the Joyner name is that of English dissent?
MR. JOYNER: They were from England. He arrived at Fort Fredericka on St. Simon’s
Island. In history, there is one of the lots in this town of Fredericka that was owned by a
man named John Joyner. My aunts told me when I was a boy that we had people who
were born at Fredericka. It’s a town that [General] Oglethorpe had built in that Fort to
guard against the Spanish intrusion into Georgia.
MR. GENTRY: So you can trace your family, as best you can tell, back to the settling of
Georgia by Oglethorpe?
MR. JOYNER: Yes sir, we are. There is a river island over in Wayne County, near
Jesup named Joyner’s Island. There is another place in there, where my grandfather was
born and raised right across the river from Joyner’s Island. It was deeded to them by the
King of England. That’s the way a lot of people got their land back in those days. They
were pretty good pieces of land too. But that’s beautiful country up and down that
Altamaha River.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s jump now to 1911, you were born in Folkston. Can you describe
your earliest recollections of not only Folkston, but also the Okefenokee and Waycross
area around the Swamp; this coastal plain area? What are your earliest recollections of
what it looked like compared to now? What kind of a habitat was this?
MR. JOYNER: Back in those days cattle and hogs and all ran free range. They were just
loose. We’d get out late in the evening and call the hogs. They could hear you from four
or five miles down in the creek swamps and places. They’d come up for their feed. Of
course hogs had their own way of eating. They hand a little intelligence too, because
they’d fight for the low end of the trough. People would save their dishwater and food
scraps and make a slop out of it. Of course at the low end of the trough it was deeper.
You had more to eat. And the hogs would fight over that end of the trough.
MR. GENTRY: So you had cattle and hogs and other livestock just running free? It’s
kind of like the open range of the west?
MR. JOYNER: That’s exactly what it was. Just the same way. Back in, oh good night,
I forget the times, but I think Roosevelt was President; Franklin Roosevelt, and the
farmers out west had a terrible drought out there. The government, to keep everybody
from going broke bought a lot of cattle from those people out west and shipped them
down to south Georgia and probably other states. They shipped just hundreds of head of
cattle down here and they brought that “screw worm”, we called it with them. It just
about devastated everything that we had. Because those screwworm flies would lay their
eggs on the other animals, you know. And if there was a sore spot or whatever, they’d
just bore right down into the skin. Finally, and especially in sheep when they turned
sheep out, you couldn’t see the flies soon enough to kill them. They’d kill the sheep.
MR. GENTRY: Back in that time when you were out just walking in the woods or riding
through the woods, however you got about as a young person, what did the land look
like? Was it all pine trees?
MR. JOYNER: It was pine trees and wire grass.
MR. GENTRY: Well what kind of pine trees?
MR. JOYNER: They were mostly slash pine; it’s the same ones that we have now. But
there’s what they call Loblolly now. We called them Black Pine in those days. It
wouldn’t do for turpentine because it just didn’t run the sap that the slash pine did. Slash
pine of course, they’d contract with some man and his family to work say ten thousand
cups on it. They had a metal tool with about a five or six pound weight on one end of it.
And they’d strike across the bark of the tree and knock it down a layer. Then they do the
same on the other side so that you had a “V” shaped face on that tree. It wasn’t a
pronounced V but anyhow, that’s the way it was. They would mold an apron up against
the tree on each side of that face and hang a cup under it. They’d just drive a thirty or
forty penny spike under the cup, slip it up under that metal and the pine gum would run
down in the cup. Approximately once a month they would take the barrels and put out
in the woods. They’d take a dip bucket, we called it, and scoop out the pine tar in a
bucket and tote it to the barrel and dump into there. It seems like the barrel was always a
mile and a half too far! You had to tote that bucket and it was just all a man could do, to
do a real days work out in the turpentine woods.
MR. GENTRY: Was that done in the middle of the summertime?
MR. JOYNER: It was done in the summertime, of course, when the sap was running. In
the wintertime, the faces grew up. I’ve seen faces that would be up twelve or fifteen feet.
But then they’d get to the point where you don’t have much gum running because it
sticks to that face as it comes down and dries. You had to be real careful of woods fires
because turpentine burns like gasoline, you know, or worse. They’d hire a bunch of
people to get out there with hoes and weed around the tree to cut the wiregrass away
from each pine tree. That was wintertime work. My uncle was a turpentine man. He
had is own still out in back of his house in Folkston. He’d lease timber from around.
MR. GENTRY: What were they using all of that turpentine for back then?
MR. JOYNER: Oh lord; they used the resin for all kinds of things! I don’t know what, I
guess in manufacturing stuff, I don’t know what else. But the spirits of turpentine, of
course, we used it as a medicine. I remember one time some boys and I were going one
time in a Model A sedan to the river to go swimming. Back in those days it was free
country and there was grass on the roads. The shoulders of the highways had cattle on
them all of the time. You had to be careful or you’d wreck with the cows. There was a
cow with her backend up on the edge of the road and her front feet were down in the
ditch. She was leaning over. I had my arm kind of out the window by the elbow. I told
the guy to pull over that way and I would catch her by the tail, just playing. But the boy
got too close and I stuck my arm out like I was gonna catch her by the tail and I actually
hit the cow on the hip and it drove my arm up against the back of the window. It took
the hide and all off of it back there. Well, they carried me on back to town because it was
bleeding a little bit. I had to walk four miles to home out to Trader’s Hill. I walked by a
turpentine still and they were running off, or what they called “taking off a charge”. They
were running the turpentine into a barrel. It was coming out of the still. It was still
warm. It was being condensed. It was coming down into the barrel, and I stuck my arm
down in the barrel of hot turpentine; all the way up to here. I held it there for three or
four minutes. When I got home, my arm wasn’t sore at all. It just healed right up with no
problem. It was pretty good lick that hit it there.
MR. GENTRY: I want to go back to the cattle and livestock running free; but were you
old enough at that time, or were you aware of any kind of damage to the environment at
that time because of that?
MR. JOYNER: No. I found nothing wrong with it. The woods were open in those
days. You could see through the woods. You didn’t have all that underbrush because it
was burnt off every year. The fires were low, it was just grass burning. Every once in a
while a tree would catch but even if it burned ‘til it burned out, it didn’t burn the tree
down or anything.
MR. GENTRY: Were those natural fires, or what?
MR. JOYNER: Well, they could be natural. But the farmers would carefully burn all
around out there were their cows used, that called it. That green grass would come up and
the cows begin to get some nourishment out of it. But just wiregrass in itself, old dry
wiregrass, is just that; wire. It looks like and feels like it. The cows won’t eat it. They
can’t get any nourishment out of it anyhow. It was burnt off every year. It keeps all the
scrub down. But now, if the fire gets out in the woods, it’ll burn up half a million dollars
worth of timber before you can get it stopped. Because all that brush is grown up you
know. You can just look out around here and see it. But there’d be thousands and
thousand of robins. They’d coming down every year to these burned off woods. They
could eat the cooked insects and all like that you know. But there would just be crowds
of the woods. You could hear them.
MR. GENTRY: I wonder where the farmers learned to burn the woods like that? Do
you suppose they learned that from the Native Americans that lived in this part of the
country?
MR. JOYNER: I don’t see why they had to learn it from anybody. It just looks like
common sense. They burned it off and got tender grass when they did that. The cows
begin to get a little fat.
MR. GENTRY: So who come along with this bright idea to stop all the burning?
MR. JOYNER: Oh boy, I don’t know. I just have no idea, but there was signs all up
around everywhere. “You can grow soft timber in forty years if you keep fire out”. Of
course the pulp wood people, the big timber companies say that we’ve got more pine
trees now that we’ve ever had. That’s true but saplings is all in the world it is. There’s
no lumber to it. The trees that they cut, they might get two by fours or four by fours out
of it.
MR. GENTRY: Were those government signs that were up? Were they from the
Department of Agriculture?
MR. JOYNER: I think so. I’m not sure where they came from. But I know they were
from the timber service part of the government, or the state government. I guess it was
just the State of Georgia.
MR. GENTRY: So how did that turn out?
MR. JOYNER: Well we still got it. And what we’ve got now is just a jungle out there
and all the timber’s been cut off just about. It’s all saplings now. The fields have been
just abandoned you know, and they plant pine trees in it. I just enjoyed coming up. I
was a “one horse farmer”. I had a horse, and a milk cow. And we had several other cattle
in the woods. We could kill a beef if we wanted to. We killed hogs most of the time. We
butchered them out and had a smoke house. We had a hand pump on the back porch. It
was just the old-time way. The way they came in, very few houses were sealed on the
inside. You just had the outside boards overhead and around you.
MR. GENTRY: Were the woods prettier back then?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. It was open. You could see for half a mile through the woods.
Pine trees were all there. The weather was different back in those days. We had, in the
fall of the year we would pull the leaves off of the corn stalks while they were still green
and hang them up behind the ear of corn one right after another. Those corn leaves would
dry and we’d tit them in bundles and put them in the crib in the barn, to feed on. There’s
never been a better smelling feed than the fodder we called it. There would be ‘fodder
showers’ we called it. You could see white rain coming through the woods as a cloud
went over you know. But every time you’d pull fodder wanting it to get dry, then it was
the time of year when those fodder showers would come every afternoon just enough to
make you wait another day before you could get your leaves into the crib.
MR. GENTRY: You mean just regular rain showers coming through the woods?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes! It would be what we always called “white rain”. We didn’t
have telephones or electric lights or anything like that. But if you got in trouble you took
the old shotgun off of the door up there and fired three shots, evenly spaced. Then your
neighbors would come to you. People lived sometimes half a mile from their nearest
neighbor. You could get in a spot where you needed a neighbor every once in a while.
MR. GENTRY: I understand that they had this idea to stop the farmers from burning
and everything; the proscribed burning is what it’s called now. You took a job checking
on all of that?
MR. JOYNER: I took a job trying to keep the farmers and people from burning.
MR. GENTRY: Who was that with?
MR. JOYNER: That was with the County Commissioners of Charlton County. I
believe there were four Commissioners, and each one hired a man to ride his section.
They divided the county up like that. My mind just won’t work right or I could tell you
who the Commissioner was that worked for.
MR. GENTRY: Well, that’s probably not as important as getting you to describe what
your job was like. How did you go about doing it?
MR. JOYNER: I just rode through the woods, off of the roads, all back in among the
farms back in there. I remember one; the man’s name was Reese Rider. They were
supposed to be kind of rough people. I never found them that way. Any body I ever had
association with back out in the woods there was just good people. They went to church
and all that. Now and then you’d find somebody that’d kill you if you messed with him!
But they were all good people. On top of the fact that they stopped us from burning the
woods, then they had a law that said you had to have a fence around your field, to keep
the livestock out of your field.
MR. GENTRY: You mean out of the woods?
MR. JOYNER: No, out of your fields.
MR. GENTRY: Let me get this right, the livestock were running everywhere?
MR. JOYNER: The livestock were in the woods. You fenced in your corn patch, your
cornfields or whatever you farmed; the farming land, to keep all of the cattle out of your
field. But then they passed what they called the “no fence law”. You didn’t have to have
a fence around your field. And if my cattle got into your patch, and ate up your corn or
whatever, then I was liable for it. Because I had to keep the cattle fenced up then instead
of having to fence off the field. So what did that do? That stopped people from running
cattle in the woods. We don’t have cows out in the woods now.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back and talk about your job? How much did you get paid, if
you don’t mind me asking?
MR. JOYNER: I got paid $100.00 a month, which was a big salary, or wage back in
those days.
MR. GENTRY: What year was that?
MR. JOYNER: Oh boy, it was in the early 1930’s.
MR. GENTRY: That was good money!
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes! I worked a many a day for a dollar a day!
MR. GENTRY: You provided your own horse?
MR. JOYNER: I provided my own horse; feed and all. I got no benefits except that
$100.00 a month out of it, and I was tickled to death to get that.
MR. GENTRY: How far did you ride on that horse on a daily basis doing that?
MR. JOYNER: Well, I’d ride from Trader’s Hill to out there in the swamp and that was
about ten or twelve miles. I was supposed to ride from the time the grass dried until the
dew started falling; which was almost an impossibility to do. Sometimes the dew didn’t
start falling. They saw dew doesn’t fall, but I’ve seen it spatter on the car. It wasn’t
raining.
MR. GENTRY: So you mean that you had to ride from in the morning, when it got hot?
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: So, you were to ride your horse out from Trader’s Hill out to the
swamp from the time in the morning, maybe nine or ten o’clock maybe?
MR. JOYNER: I’d just get up at daylight and go to work as soon as I could get my horse
fed and eat some breakfast myself. I get astride and go on and be in the woods.
MR. GENTRY: I am trying to picture this in my mind. You are sitting on your horse.
You’ve probably got you some lunch packed, or something like that.
MR. JOYNER: Yeah, usually some smokehouse meat and baked sweet potatoes and
things like that.
MR. GENTRY: And you’ve probably got you a weapon of some type?
MR. JOYNER: Well, they wanted me to carry a gun, but I knew better that to take a gun
out there among those people. I wasn’t after shooting anybody, so I didn’t. They were
friends of mine, you know! I just didn’t want to make a war out of it.
MR. GENTRY: So you didn’t carry anything for rattlesnakes or anything like that?
MR. JOYNER: Oh no, I didn’t a gun with me at all.
MR. GENTRY: I just trying to kind of picture your day. We’re just going to kind of
walk through this. You got on your horse at daybreak, got you some smokehouse meat,
and you are unarmed and you set off riding on your horse.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right, and I’d kind of get in my mind where I wanted to ride that
day. I’ve been back in; this was in the season when farmers usually would begin to burn
off patches of woods.
MR. GENTRY: What time of the year was that?
MR. JOYNER: The time of the year was in the fall and winter. The grass would be
dead, and they’d burn it off. Then before warm weather came, that wiregrass would be
green and growing. The cows would begin to get a little fat on it you know.
MR. GENTRY: So the purpose of you riding out through the woods and doing this was
what?
MR. JOYNER: It was to keep people from burning the woods. The fact that there was
somebody looking for it out there would be a deterrent to keep the farmers from setting
the woods on fire. Most of the farmers wouldn’t do it, but you’ve always got some that
would you know.
MR. GENTRY: This was a County effort to stop burning so the timber would grow?
MR. JOYNER: That’s correct. That is right.
MR. GENTRY: Even to this day, that’s sort of a political question, I guess. Who
determined what was most important? The farmers had an interest in… It’s seems like
there was kind a struggle here, between the poor one horse farmers and the landowners.
Do you know what was going on there?
MR. JOYNER: In some instances it could be, and was, I am sure. But the agricultural
colleges, like the college at Tifton, they are studying all this all of the time. They come up
with the recommendations a lot of times and the counties will follow their
recommendations. Then they get up there and pass these little laws that the farmers have
to do.
MR. GENTRY: But the passing of that law to reduce the burning was in the interest of
someone in the County to produce more timber, is that correct?
MR. JOYNER: That’s right. That’s correct.
MR. GENTRY: Who were the one’s passing those laws?
MR. JOYNER: Your County Commissioners I guess. Unless it was the State
government that did it; the Forestry Departments and things like that.
MR. GENTRY: Was suppressing the burning at the expense of the small one horse
farmer?
MR. JOYNER: The small farmer didn’t have anything to feed his cattle on in the woods.
If you couldn’t burn the grass off, all you had was old oak scrub and stuff coming up in
the pine forest and the cows didn’t have anything to eat. They couldn’t eat just that.
They’d survive if a farmer could help them a little with feed or something. But it wasn’t,
you couldn’t just turn your cows out in the woods and let them go. They’d have their
calves raised out there just like they would in the west.
MR. GENTRY: Who did the woods belong to at that time?
MR. JOYNER: Usually around every little town there was maybe one or two families
that had the bank and had the dry good store and grocery store, if you sold anything you
had to sell to those places of business that were owned by the prominent families. If you
bought anything, you had to buy it from their store.
MR. GENTRY: So they owned most of that land?
MR. JOYNER: They owned most of that land, that’s right. Because they could by if
for, lord, I’ve seen it go for $12.00 an acre. They’d buy up every bit that they could get.
MR. GENTRY: I am trying to understand if this prevention of burning was their effort
to protect their land, their timberland from the local farmers who wanted just to let their
cattle run out there, and to burn.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: They perceived that as not a good thing. Now I understand. So your
riding on your horse, and your job is to ride around and let people know that you are
watching so they don’t burn, is that right?
MR. JOYNER: That’s right. Well let me tell you about my horse now.
MR. GENTRY: Okay, tell me about your horse.
MR. JOYNER: She was a four year old, bay, mare. And we hit it off, right in the
beginning; just like I do any animal. She got to the point to where she wouldn’t leave me.
And one time I had ridden her as fast as she could go to get to that CCC Camp to tell
them that I had found that little fire. It was going up the hill because it was down in the
creek bottom and it was burning. It hit that hill and the wind just carried it up. I couldn’t
put it out so I ran down to the camp and they came up with five or six canvas covered
Army trucks, because the CCC Camp was under the auspices of the Army. Those
people had big rubber flaps on a handle and they were beating out the fire with it. I had a
dip paddle from somewhere. I don’t know where I got it. But I was going from tree to
another. The fire was way up above my head, and I was throwing dirt on there on it
trying to get the fire off of the pine trees, which I was doing all right. Well, those people,
I don’t know there were forty or fifty men out there all yelling and whooping and
hollering and pulling the canvas covered trucks up. I was going from one burning “cat
face” we called them; from one burning tree to the other, throwing the dirt up. And that
horse, dragging her reins and looking over my shoulder, every tree I went to, she wouldn’t
leave me anywhere! We had a real close relationship. I remember plowing with another
man’s horse and he had my horse. He got through he row running, before I did. And he
stopped her and took her loose from the plow, did the chain traces up on the haines, did
his lines up and did them up across the haines and just turned her loose. I knew good and
well that if she got to the fence row, she was going to drop her head down to eat, pick
what she could find; that collar and haines and all was going to fall behind her ears and she
was gonna get one foot through it. I just stopped the horse that I was plowing, an old
gentle thing anyhow, and I went running across the field there. It was plowed ground and
I couldn’t go too fast. But I saw her rare up on her hind feet, and sure enough she had one
foot through the bite of the chain. I yelled at her and went running to her and she
dropped her head down and held that foot up like that, [demonstrating] until I got to her
all the way across the field! She stood right there. And when I got there she, we called it
“wickered” to me. I got her untangled and tied her up then where she couldn’t get her
head down. They can’t reason a lot. You think they can sometimes. She knew that I
was coming and if she’d be still I’d get her out of it. But all of those men whooping and
hollering and that mare following right along behind me from one tree to another. They
couldn’t believe that she was doing that through all of that noise and movement and
everything. Most horses would be five miles from there by then!
MR. GENTRY: A fellow just doesn’t get the kind of relationship out of a tractor or a
ATV these days.
MR. JOYNER: No, lord no! But I’ve always made pets out of every animal I ever had.
I had a black Lab, and I still say she spoke better English than I do! Because you could
talk to her and she would nod her head at you, almost.
MR. GENTRY: Okay, I am going to get us back on track now.
MR. JOYNER: Yes, get us back on track.
MR. GENTRY: You’re out riding through the woods from daybreak to sunset I guess.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: You’re covering ten, fifteen, twenty miles, is that about right?
MR. JOYNER: Well, that’s about right, there and back. I mean, a round trip. I’d be ten
or twelve miles back out there on the swamp; the old “Ok-fen-oak”. And sometimes I’d
be at the “landing” we called it; Camp Cornelia.
MR. GENTRY: What did you see and experience when visit some of these folks who
lived out there? Did they have any animosity towards you? Did they ever dislike you
because of what you were doing?
MR. JOYNER: No, they didn’t have any animosity towards the whole thing. They just
looked at it as another law that the “town people” had made, see. That’s what bothers
everybody; the people in town can’t understand the people living out there. Because
those people use the language and words and things that their ancestors did when they
moved over here. They came from England. They used the words ‘ever’ and ‘never’ in a
different way than we do. Instead of saying, “Did you ever see a cow down there back of
the field?”, the man would say, “Never a one.” They shortened it to “Nare a one”. Now,
the people in town have got it to where they say, “Nary a one”. It sounds like N-A-R-Y,
“nary a one”. But just looks funny to people who came up and know how it was to hear
people say, “Nar a one”. I could go on for weeks.
MR. GENTRY: Well now, you made me think of something. Did you ever hear the
term, “over yender”?
MR. JOYNER: Oh, well now up in the mountains you’d probably run into that kind of
thing. Because they are still speaking English from the parts of England where they came
from, which was usually these people were just common working people. They had little
difference in their words and all, just like we do in this country.
MR. GENTRY: So, “yender” wasn’t a South Georgia term?
MR. JOYNER: No, I’ve never heard that. Now, “yonder”, I’ve heard that. I hear
“yonder” a lot. But to say “yender” I don’t think I’ve heard that one.
MR. GENTRY: So you’re riding your horse out there and getting paid, $100 bucks a
month, big money…
MR. JOYNER: Big money!
MR. GENTRY: And you are getting along good with these folks. You are preventing
them from setting the woods on fire and all that sort of thing right? You probably got
invited in to have lunch on occasion?
MR. JOYNER: Many a time, many a time. They were just good plain, decent people.
If necessary they’d fight you, any one of them; men, women and all, but there was
nothing to fight about.
MR. GENTRY: What kind of family names might you have run across on your ride from
family to family? What were some of the names?
MR. JOYNER: Oh boy, it’s been so long ago.
MR. GENTRY: I bet you ran across some Chessers out there.
MR. JOYNER: Oh the Chessers were all in the swamp mostly. There were one or two
of them that built a house on the outside up in the edge of Folkston. Harry Chesser did,
I’m pretty sure. The Daddy of a lot of them; his name was, well here I go again. It’s one
of the big English names.
MR. GENTRY: Were you doing all of this riding around on the horse, help me refresh
my memory, was that in the 1930’s?
MR. JOYNER: That was in the 1930’s. Because I was married and had one or two
children. I married in 1934. And that’s when Mitchell was born.
MR. GENTRY: What do you remember about Camp Cornelia out there? What was that
like? Did you ever ride out there?
MR. JOYNER: Yes, I rode out there. Back in the days when they dug that canal and
saw that the water ran back in to the swamp instead of out it, they quit with the canal.
Now what did I start to say?
MR. GENTRY: You were going to tell me about Camp Cornelia.
MR. JOYNER: Camp Cornelia.
MR. GENTRY: Who was out there?
MR. JOYNER: In the beginning, I think they had sawmills out there. The Hebberd
family from Hebberdville bought the timber in the Okefenokee Swamp. Of course they
had lines in there. But anyhow, they bought the timber out there. Most of it was on
Billy’s Island, which was the biggest island in the swamp, I believe. They had a sawmill
and they finally ran a railroad out there to it from Hebberdville, it you know where that
is. It’s in the northwestern section of Waycross. It used to be called Hebberdville. There
was a big commissary up there. Hebbard Cypress Company. Now I’m lost again.
MR. GENTRY: Well, when you were riding around in the 1930’s, were they still
bringing big cypress trees out of there?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. I don’t know just exactly when they got through cutting the
cypress out of it.
MR. GENTRY: I was wondering if you saw a time where there were these huge pine
trees and huge cypress being brought out. We’ll never see them again.
MR. JOYNER: Yes, and we’ll never see them again because they cut cypress out that
that Okefenokee Swamp that was big trees when Columbus discovered this country!
Cypress grows slow. I don’t know, the pine trees is all at least second growth stuff. You
don’t see any old original pines any more. They were oh, that big around; huge trees.
And they had just two or three inches, it seems like, of what we called sap wood on the
outside. The rest of it was heart. It’s a permanent wood. I’ve tried to cut access to the
window weights in an old house that my mother had over in Waycross. It was built out
of that old heart pine and I just tore my chisels up trying to cut through a little one-inch
board!
MR. GENTRY: So when you were a kid, or later when you were riding and all of that,
did you still see some of that?
MR. JOYNER: Some of those big trees; you could see a few. You could see, well, there
was one of them standing down right here on my place you might say. It was on the road
between me and Mac Murray over there.
MR. GENTRY: Could you see them still being hauled out on the rail or what?
MR. JOYNER: No, they were hauling with trucks.
MR. GENTRY: But they were hauling out of the swamp?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. Now, out of the Okefenokee Swamp, I can remember a tram
road. The engine and train came right by my granddaddy’s fence. It was within thirty
feet of his fence where that train would go through there, and it was going to Camp
Cornelia I’m pretty sure. Hey son! This is my son John, he’s my oldest boy. This is
Mr. Gentry.
MR. GENTRY: You say it was going to Camp Cornelia. Would it be going to and from
hauling logs, or what?
MR. JOYNER: Yes, it would be going to and from and I can remember freight cars on it.
There would be four or five freight cars it seems like. But I actually don’t remember
seeing logs hauled out of there. Although I don’t know what the heck else they would
have hauled out, unless it was cut lumber. They might have done that because they had a
sawmill out there.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back to your horseback riding days. When did all that change?
When did somebody decide that they didn’t need you to do that anymore?
MR. JOYNER: Well, it was just one year that I rode. I could get off of her and climb up
into the fire tower and talk to the boy up there. I’d ask him what’s going on and all of
that. They could stop the fires. They had a compass right under the thing and by
triangulation they could pinpoint it and send somebody out to stop it. Of course there’s
this little matter of smoke too. It’s good to know where it’s burning because you’d get
down there and run into fences and all that kind of stuff.
MR. GENTRY: I heard back in those days all the little bits of smoke you might see from
out in that part of the country wasn’t necessarily from a forest fire or anything else.
MR. JOYNER: Yes, I know what you’re talking about. It was “happy water”. They
had to had a little of that along. That was pretty good. I was a teenager along in those
days, and I can remember the things we’d get in to. There were some people named
Coomer, over in Camden County. He made the best shine we had in the country. The
boys called that the “Five C” whiskey, you know. That was for, “Coomers Camden
County Cool Corn”! That was the Five-C brand, the best shine there was in the south or
anywhere around. They said that if you drank it out of a food jar you’d inhale it you
know. It would make you drunker, quicker. One time we had stopped; now there’s
another thing; we had stopped at what we called “Juke Joints”. Back in those days it was
juke joints. Somebody had a two quart jar about half full of shine, passing that around.
And I got hold of it and I took me two or three deep smells of it. I was trying it out. And
I took one swallow out of that jar and I rode home in what they called the rumble seat in
those days, of a Coupe. My old Model T Ford didn’t have a top on it or anything. It
was parked at a restaurant up there. The boys put me out and I drove that old Model T
into the double garage at my Aunt and Uncle’s who I was living with at the time, and I
couldn’t get out of my car. I knew doggoned well that if I opened that door I was going to
fall on my face! So I sat there until my Aunt and Uncle came. They said, ‘Why you
sitting out here in the car?” I said, “I’m drunk!” And my Aunt said, “Why, John
Robert!” But the bad part of it was my old religious Grandmother and Grandfather was
sleeping in my bedroom. They had put some quilts down on the floor and made what we
called a pallet for me to sleep on the floor. When I got in there, I wanted to sleep as far
away from those people as I possibly could! Because I felt like I smelled like a shine still
you know. I didn’t want them to know I was drunk. And that room was going round and
round. I put my foot against the bedstead to try to hold against that going around thing,
but that didn’t help a bit! I kept going round and round until I turned over on my
stomach. When I did that, everything kind of quietened off, and I really went to sleep
after that. But I found out, don’t try to lie flat on your back and sober up. It ain’t gonna
be. That was potent stuff boy!
MR. GENTRY: Was the Okefenokee known for that sort of thing?
MR. JOYNER: They made whiskey out there, some of the people did. I remember
some, I’ll think of the name in a minute. They were the boys that their mother called
them and told them that the bear was killing, or catching a hog down at the hog pen.
[End of tape #1]
MR. GENTRY: I think I’ve got just about all of that about the horseback riding out
there. What else sort of thing did you do that was related to the swamp? What did you
see, and know about that was related to the swamp?
MR. JOYNER: Well, I know that in dry weather that the thousands of fish congregated
in the Suwannee Canal. They’d come out of the lakes and get in that canal because the
water was deeper there of course. And people could go there and just catch forty or fifty
fish before we could turn around.
MR. GENTRY: When was this?
MR. JOYNER: Well, anytime. You could do it now I guess. Of course, you’ve been to
Camp Cornelia haven’t you? Did you say your daughter worked there?
MR. GENTRY: My wife.
MR. JOYNER: At Camp Cornelia?
MR. GENTRY: Well, I guess that is Camp Cornelia, or was. It’s out there at the
National Wildlife Refuge.
MR. JOYNER: Out from Folkston?
MR. GENTRY: Yeah. Was that Camp Cornelia out there?
MR. JOYNER: Yes. And that was named Cornelia was a daughter of one of the
Hebberds. It was named after a daughter of one of those people.
MR. GENTRY: You enjoyed fishing out there I guess?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes, we used to fish a lot in the Saint Mary’s River. There’s no
better fish in the world than that! When we would go swimming it in when I was a boy,
it was, and I have seen in written somewhere that it was the deepest river, compared to
it’s width of any river in America. There are places in it where you can’t find bottom.
We used to be swimming suits and all. We just shucked off and jumped in. But you
could swim out there in the middle of that river and turn down and swim down until you
hit a cold streak of water and just open your mouth and drink all of the water you wanted
and come up to the top. Old sailing ships used to come up the Saint Mary’s River to get
water for their ships, you know, for overseas. It had enough tannic acid in it. It’s kind of
a brown looking water. It’s colored because of the stuff that’s in there. But it would
keep. The water wouldn’t go bad on the sailing ships.
MR. GENTRY: I guess that acid was like a preservative.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s take about some of the critters that might have run across as a kid.
Was there any panthers out here?
MR. JOYNER: There was an occasional report of a panther or something being seen in
the swamp. I know that my cousin, who worked for Georgia Power Company liked to
hunt. And he lived right down there on the edge of the swamp. He would go hunting at
night with his dog, or dogs, whatever; and one night the dog was barking up a tree and he
had his bright light that he could set on the ground for working. He had his climbing
hooks on his legs. He shined that light up the tree and saw two eyes up there. He shot
up it, and he thought he had hit whatever it was. And had hung up there. He set his light
down on the ground so it would shine up in the tree and climbed up there. It was what
the old folks used to call a “tiger”. I have never seen one, but I’ve heard them describe it.
It’s a cat, a good bit bigger than a wildcat, which is the small cat in the woods.
MR. GENTRY: A Bobcat?
MR. JOYNER: The Bobcat is bigger than the wildcat. This thing was bigger than the
Bobcat. And it was black and white stripped like a tiger. I don’t know of the stripes
were fore and aft or aforeship [?], but they were stripes anyway. But that’s the only
report of panthers or cats.
MR. GENTRY: What about wolves?
MR. JOYNER: There were wolves in there when my people first moved here, I think,
but there were mighty few of them. They had tales that they would tell us about wolves
getting after somebody and them running to the house to get away from them; things like
that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What about trapping? Didn’t they used to trap for fur?
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. They trapped. When I was a boy we used to set steel traps,
which is one of the cruelest things there is in the world for an animal. But we’d set traps.
It was a big deal for a boy to catch a coon, or a possum or something in the woods. We’d
catch one every once in a while. A lot of people, especially people in the swamp, they
would sell hides and things like that through the mail. They finally stopped all of that, or
were supposed to have stopped it.
MR. GENTRY: We say that it was cruel now. Can I assume that in that era when you
were a boy that no body thought about that as being cruel?
MR. JOYNER: Well, just the hide was more valuable than their feeling for the animal.
That’s all I can say.
MR. GENTRY: It’s called survival.
MR. JOYNER: There you go. They’ve actually known of coon, fox or whatever
gnawing his foot off to get away from that steel trap.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Daddy, when we lived out at Trader’s Hill out at the swamp there,
I remember you telling us about hearing what you figured was a cat or something that
sounded like it was prowling around the house.
MR. JOYNER: That was right out in front of the house. I had two little blue-ticked
puppies and I finally persuaded my wife to go with me in the woods at night. We’d gone
almost to the creek and just as we came back, my puppies struck a trail over there and
they went to tree’in right quick. That’s a little difference in the sound of their bark,
whenever they get them up a tree. I went running across there, yelling at her to come on
and she wouldn’t go with me that time. When I came back from that deal, I was getting
pretty close to the house and the puppies run out into the clump of plow meadows or
something out there. I could hear something growling in it. I kicked in the bushes a little
bit and it growled in. I called my puppies and got a hold of them and got them away
because I didn’t know if it was a wildcat. Those puppies were only a third grown and I
didn’t want them to get tangled up in there with something. But that thing ran out of
those bushes. I never did see what it was. It sounded like a bird flying. It sounded like it
was five or six feet above the ground. It went all the way around our house and over to
Frank Bryant’s house; our neighbor, a good ways over in the woods there. It was just
yelling, “Yow, Yow, Yow”. It was screaming kind of, all the time around there. I have no
idea what it was.
MR. GENTRY: In that time, it sounds like you were a lot closer to nature. Everybody
thinks that it’s ideal being close to nature, but there seemed to be some kind of danger
involved.
MR. JOYNER: Yeah, well, you could get yourself in trouble. Especially in the swamp.
They had gators, alligators in there. And I think there was a panther or two. They said
that an alligator would try to knock a dog out of your boat. I don’t know why he would
want to pick on dogs. Maybe it was a delicacy to him, I don’t know. But you could get
bit by them too, if you didn’t watch what you were doing.
MR. GENTRY: Snakes?
MR. JOYNER: Oh, snakes are everywhere. I’ve killed rattlers in my right here in my
front yard five or six feet long; big Diamondbacks.
MR. GENTRY: Back in the 1930’s and 1940’s and that era back through there; was
every snake a dangerous snake in people’s minds, or in your mind?
MR. JOYNER: No, not every snake. No.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Tell him about the time you got snake bit Daddy.
MR. JOYNER: I can’t remember that.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: You said that you did everything wrong that there was to do.
MR. JOYNER: Oh, that was down in Bartow, Florida. My brother had bought a truck
farm down there and I had moved my wife and that baby right there. [Referring to now
grown daughter] She slept on a pillow all the way down to Bartow, or Ft. Meade from
Folkston. But I had gone down to the back of the field trying to get fat wood for
splinters to build a fire. Something hit me on the foot and it kept hurting more and more.
I had some wood on my shoulder; long pieces. I threw them across the fence and crawled
back over to the cleared ground. I looked at my foot and there’s two drops of blood
sitting there. I figured a little brown rattler or something had bit me. When I got to the
house, my leg was hurting; all up in my knee and all. I didn’t have any whiskey down
there, which is supposed to be a snakebite remedy. But somebody got some from
somewhere, which is the wrong thing to do, because that makes your blood go through
your body faster. Of course, I guess if you get yourself totally stiff with it, it might over
do the bite, but anyway, they finally got me to a doctor. At first, I cut it, or Jim did, or
somebody did; cut it across and stuck it down in a bucket of kerosene of something.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: You said that after you drank a little of that whiskey you wouldn’t
care if the yard was full of snakes! Tell about the time at Trader’s Hill near the swamp
when you were walking with your Granddaddy down a path, and you were walking
behind him that time and he stepped on that snake. Tell about that. You remember that?
MR. JOYNER: He was whistling a church song, he hollered at me. I remember we were
dipping some gum then. He had his pine trees cut. He said, “Son, I think I’ll walk down
to the river and see how the tide is”. That river makes tides all the way to Trader’s Hill.
We’d go fishing later on. He was going around what we called a “bay head”, a low spot. I
saw him just jumping up and his feet going high, still whistling that church song, whatever
it was. When he came back and said, “Well the tide looks like it’s about right. We’ll go
whenever you get ready.” I said, “Granddaddy, what in the world were you jumping so
high for out there a while ago?” He said, “Well, I stepped right across a Black Snake and
it kind of scared me. Every time I jumped off of him to let him run, I’d come down, the
snake would get tangled up in my legs again.” He never quit whistling at all. Just jumping
up and down and whistling. He was in his eighties then I guess! He was 102 when he
died.
MR. GENTRY: Talk a little bit of the perception at that time of folks who lived in this
part of the country about snakes. Now we have endangered snakes.
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes. Don’t want the snakes! They’ll run out of town! That would
be a bad thing. I don’t get it sometimes, but I love everything all the time. It doesn’t
make any difference; I can just smile about all of it.
MR. GENTRY: But I take that there was never any consideration when you were
growing up, or even to this day, that there should be a concern for any of the snakes that
might be endangered.
MR. JOYNER: Actually, I guess they have their place in the environment. I know they
eat rats and maybe we’d all be overrun with rats if we didn’t have snakes. I don’t know.
Well, mice or wood rats or whatever. I never heard anybody being worried about one
species being extinct or anything like that.
MR. GENTRY: What about the same issue about the Red Cockaded Woodpecker? Are
you familiar with that species of woodpecker?
MR. JOYNER: You’re talking about the pileated one. They called them “pill-e-ated”.
But that means haired, and they’ve got that cockade up there.
MR. GENTRY: Well now, there’s one particular species of woodpecker. It a little one
about that big.
MR. JOYNER: I’ve seen the red headed woodpecker many times.
MR. GENTRY: Back in the 1930’s and 1940’s evidently that wasn’t any sort of an
issue; that you might ever have a woodpecker that was ever in danger, or anything like
that?
MR. JOYNER: I never heard of that.
MR. GENTRY: Was there any concept, or did anybody ever think about in those times;
and I don’t mean for this to come across as critical, I am just trying to get the mindset,
and the way yall were thinking about things.
MR. JOYNER: I understand.
MR. GENTRY: And the way I was thinking about things. In fact, we used to eat gopher
soup whenever I was a kid.
MR. JOYNER: What was the mindset of people back in that era about animals that might
disappear forever, go extinct?
MR. JOYNER: I don’t know whether we had environmentalists or whoever worried
about it in those days. We didn’t see a lot of it. Time goes by so fast ‘til I can’t
remember a certain period of time; what the mindset was. But it seems like in maybe the
past ten years we’ve run into more of that extinct thing than we did before. I don’t think
that there was a lot of worrying about anything going extinct back in say the 1930’s and
1940’s.
MR. GENTRY: Did you ever eat gopher stew, or gopher soup?
MR. JOYNER: I’ve eaten gopher, in a stew one time. But the people in Jacksonville,
they said that they’d pay for their groceries with gopher and get little gophers in change.
They’d have big gophers stews. I worked in the shipyard during the War. I was the only
one in the family that didn’t get in there.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s just clarify; we’re talking about the Gopher Tortoise.
MR. JOYNER: That’s right. Not the animal.
MR. GENTRY: Back in that era it was quite common to catch them and take them to
market.
MR. JOYNER: Out in south Georgia, we didn’t do that. But the people in north Florida
did it a lot. They’d have big parties and have gopher stew. I don’t know how else they
cooked them. But the one’s that I ate was on the banks of the St. Mary’s River down at
Moody Landing. I had these two boys from Jacksonville with me. We waded the boat
and went up the canal. I saw an old soft-shelled turtle; it was laying eggs up there. Good
nights, it was that big around! There were several of them up there on the bank, on a flat
place. When we pulled up there they began to run. But there were some of them still
working down to the hole. You know, they would dig a hole and turn around to lay the
eggs and then cover it up and leave it that way. It was just like they used to do in the
ocean when we used to go egg hunting at night; turtle egg hunting. You could get fifty or
seventy-five eggs out of some those holes that the old sea turtles had laid.
MR. GENTRY: Where was that?
MR. JOYNER: I was in Folkston because I wanted to be at Folkston because my
Grandmother and Grandfather lived alone out near Traders Hill. Spanish Creek ran in to
the river down there. The River ran this way and their house was in here. You could
walk down to the creek or you could walk down to the river. If you heard a car, you
knew it was coming to your house. They were alone out there and it was just hog heaven
for me!
MR. GENTRY: But you must have went over to the coast for the sea turtle eggs?
MR. JOYNER: Okay, that’s…We lived in Orlando. That’s were I went to all my
schooling, with the exception of one year up at North Carolina; Brevard, North Carolina.
That school is still there I understand.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Isn’t it a military school?
MR. JOYNER: No, it’s not a military school. I went to military school down in
Orlando. The man who came down and started the school; he didn’t last but a year or
two. He didn’t have any money to start with. But it was old Colonel Crawford Hulvey.
They were from the Tennessee Military Institute. They came down to Florida to start it.
But we had a couple of years of good training down there.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: You were a bugler weren’t you?
MR. JOYNER: I was a bugler.
MR. GENTRY: You must have gone over to the Atlantic coast?
MR. JOYNER: We did. We went to Daytona Beach. I had a brother who lived at
Daytona. We’d go over and visit him. We’d put on our swimsuits and just put a shirt on
over our shoulders and stay on the beach all day, every day. We were just kids then. I
don’t know; I was in my very earliest teens I guess.
MR. GENTRY: Let’s go back to the Okefenokee. I’m getting off the subject. Is there
anything else about the Okefenokee, or that part of the country? There was turpentine
we talked about, and timber, all that sort of stuff. I think we’ve just about got all of that.
But what else have you got to tell me?
MR. JOYNER: I was gonna tell you that my Uncle had an Ox team. And he would haul
those enormous logs; for this part of the country anyhow, to the sawmill. Well, thing
right here is off of one of his steers. [Showing an artifact] It’s a cow horn. He’s got this
thing on it. [Mr. Joyner demonstrates that he can blow into it with a mouthpiece, which
is attached.]
MR. GENTRY: Show me that again. Where did you say that came from?
MR. JOYNER: This is off of, I am assuming, off of one of his oxen. They’d cut the
horns off of them. It looks to me like they’d kill them doing it because it leaves a hole in
their skull up there. Some how or another it heals over. But he made a horn to blow for
his dogs or whatever out of this. This is, oh lord, a good hundred years old. It’s still as
solid as it could be.
MR. GENTRY: How’s it work?
MR. JOYNER: You just blow through it to call the dogs or whatever. [Demonstrates
again] People used to use them to call their dogs up when they had a pack of dogs out
hunting foxes or whatever.
MR. GENTRY: Okay. What else have we got over here? Did you have some books that
you were going to show me?
MR. JOYNER: Yeah, I was gonna let you see some of these things. I almost have to
have you sitting here by me.
MR. GENTRY: That’s okay; I’m kind of familiar with that Foxfire book. What have
you got in there?
MR. JOYNER: It’s the same thing.
MR. GENTRY: It shows you a lot of the old ways of doing stuff?
MR. JOYNER: The old ways of doing stuff.
MR. GENTRY: I am primarily more interested in…
MR. JOYNER: In the swamp.
MR. GENTRY: …in your history and that. Do you have any photos of you back in the
horseback days, or anything like that?
MR. JOYNER: I don’t believe I’ve got a single picture of me on that kind of thing.
JOHN JOYNER, JR: Can you tell about the saddle coming in the mail to ride that horse
in the swamp?
MR. JOYNER: [Laughing] Yeah!
MR. GENTRY: You had a Sears and Roebuck saddle, huh?
MR. JOYNER: A Sears and Roebuck saddle. It was made by Bonner Allen up on
Georgia which makes a lot of the western saddles.
MR. GENTRY: You know what? You might have the answer to this question. What
does the term “Georgia cracker” mean?
MR. JOYNER: Oh, well, I’ve got tale, and theory about that. When Oglethorpe first; of
course, he built the colony at Savannah to begin with. They was afraid that the Spanish
were gonna come up and take the Georgia colonies. So they built a fort of St. Simon’s
Island. They called it Fort Fredericka, and they had a town on there too, which was the
town of Fredericka of course. Now, here my minds gone again!
MR. GENTRY: We were talking about where the term “Georgia cracker” came from.
MR. JOYNER: Okay. He needed somebody to teach his people how to be soldiers. He
had a good many men but he wanted a troop or a company of crack troops down there to
train his men. They had to house them in the city’s private homes. They didn’t have
any big barracks built for them. So they said, and this is just from conjecture of what I’ve
heard along and along; that this women said, “They’ve got three soldiers in my house!”
And people would ask her, “Well, are they our boys, or are they those crackers?” They
had a crack company that come in, they called them crackers. That’s the way they’ve
always been known, as Georgia Crackers. People in South Carolina would say, “If we
had some of those Georgia Crackers up here, we could do…” so and so; I don’t know.
But that’s feasible. It could have been done just that way. When you go back to the old
people, they had it back in those days too. And you hope that somewhere down the line
it comes from the truth somewhere. But I don’t know, they do that just like they do the
words that we use, and things like that.
MR. GENTRY: I am going to change the subject a little bit, but back to the swamp and
my purpose for talking to you. Was these woods that were here then, and the swamp
and all of that that was pretty essential to the survival of everybody down here wasn’t it?
MR. JOYNER: People farmed, and they had smoke houses and tater banks and
corncribs. They lived like that. They killed their own meat and knew how to cure it, and
all that stuff, you know.
JOHN JOYNER, JR. They hunted out of season if they had to after they started the
seasons.
MR. JOYNER: Oh yeah, they hunted. My poor old Granddad he came up living in the
woods and killing animals as he wanted, and needed to eat. I was telling the kids the other
day, I’ve seen my Grandmother when she’d hear Granddad’s gun fire down there in
branch or creek or somewhere; she’d get up and go put the frying pan on. She knew he’d
there at the house with something to eat! Some meat, you know. Usually it was squirrels
or rabbit or something like that. Sometimes it would be birds; quail and turkeys. Lord,
I’ve followed behind my Granddad hunting turkeys when my eyes were level with the
small of back, until I could see over his head! Then I had a gun of my own.
MR. GENTRY: Well wasn’t there a period of time in like the 1930’s and 1940’s when
almost all of the turkeys and deer were shot out in this part of the country?
MR. JOYNER: Boy, they sure were! If you saw a deer that was, well, you just didn’t
see big deer out in the woods up in here, or in Charlton County anyway. The people in
the swamp used to kill them and eat them all of the time. I guess it didn’t make any
difference whether they were killing a buck, Bye son, [John Jr. leaving], or a doe. A lot of
the time, I feel like they would eat the choice meat and feed the rest of it to the dogs. But
I saw somebody offer a man a hundred dollars for a black bear cub in Folkston, at a
Service station. He had that little cub; a little bitty fellow, and this tourist came through
and offered him a hundred dollars for him.
MR. GENTRY: When was that?
MR. JOYNER: Oh lord, I don’t know what year it was, but I was a grown boy, a young
man. But bears were all gone too. They stopped people from going in the swamp with
guns. The wildlife came right back.
MR. GENTRY: But there was a period of time, was it like the 1930’s or 1940’s that the
gators and the bear and deer and all that were pretty much shot out?
MR. JOYNER: They were. I know that the gators that were in the rivers and creeks and
things in south Georgia were just gone. All of them. You never did see a deer or hardly
any other animal out in the open. But now, out in back of her house, we saw fifteen or
twenty turkeys just the other day, wild turkeys. My Granddad and I used to hunt them
all of the time.
MR. GENTRY: So during the period of time when you were in your twenties and
thirties is when game, big animals like that, were pretty scarce.
MR. JOYNER: They were scarce.
MR. GENTRY: What changed that? What brought them back?
MR. JOYNER: Well, the environmentalist; that’s what I call them. I don’t know if that’s
the right name for these people who handle all of this livestock stuff or not. But anyhow,
they just began to make an effort about stopping the killing of the few deer that was left
in there so they could have grandchildren you know. They can still be counted. The deer
begin to come now so that…I can’t grow watermelons out here, the deer will eat up the
melons themselves! They’ll just eat a melon and go to the next one and eat in it a little bit
and just ruin your melon patch.
MR. GENTRY: So it sounds like to me in that period of the 1930’s, and here again, I
certainly don’t mean to criticize because people were probably about starving to death. It
sounds like they were just killing off stuff to survive.
MR. JOYNER: It could have been. People had farms, and they had plenty to eat. Meat
is something that they could raise themselves. Squirrels and rabbits and things like that
are as prolific as they can be. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a scarcity of rabbits and
squirrels.
MR. GENTRY: Do you think it was that people were hunting just for the fun of
hunting?
MR. JOYNER: Well, that’s one of the things. They would bring in foxes and coyotes
and everything else and turn them loose out here, so that they’d have something to run.
Well those things would breed and have young. It wouldn’t be long before it would be
like it is now; you can’t plant anything in the garden, the blooming deer will eat it up!
MR. GENTRY: It sounds like to me that what you’re saying; and I don’t want to put
words in your mouth, that it was like unregulated hunting. They were just allowed to do
whatever they wanted to; that was the problem.
MR. JOYNER: That is right. That’s what will kill out everything. A lot of people just
for sport they’ll house twelve or fifteen head of dogs all year to get to run them four or
five times during some season or other. They’ll have them in concrete floored pens with
boxes or sections so they can get out of the rain. But so far as the cold weather and that
kind of stuff is concerned; I guess some of them might have some heat out there, but most
of them didn’t have. The dogs just took it, that’s all. That has always bothered me. I
wouldn’t have dogs shut up in a kennel; and then go get your dogs once a month and turn
them out. A god can’t reason, he’ll run himself to death! He’s been just sitting for a
month, and then take him out in cold weather and run him to death. They’ll run ‘til they
fall you know.
MR. GENTRY: Would they be chasing deer?
MR. JOYNER: Chasing deer, chasing fox, chasing coyotes. They get on an old red fox;
he’ll quit the land. He’ll go twenty-five or thirty miles, and your dog’s right behind him
all of that time! The gray fox will circle round and round in here. They put a few red
foxes in here, but they didn’t like them much. It ruined their dogs.
MR. JOYNER’ S DAUGHTER: A lot of out of state people would come and hunt.
MR. JOYNER: Oh yes! Lord a mercy, people from out of state. A lot of Florida
people would come up and hunt. So I don’t know, for a while everything was good. And
then all of a sudden everything was bad. There’s no deer. People were catching quail in
traps. I had to stop them out here from trapping quail. That’s against the law to start
with. I just like to see the quail go through the yard, you know. They ain’t hurting
nothing! It’s fun.
MR. GENTRY: It sounds like you just can’t let people do whatever they want to
whenever it comes to …
MR. JOYNER: There’s got to be some regulation somewhere down because if
everybody thought the same way you could kind of adjust their thinking. But you can’t
do it. It’s what they want now. It’s what they want to do. They just like the fun or the
sport out of it. I just think too much of the animals. I like to see them. We’ve got bird’s
grandmother out there now. I feed them every day. We’ve got blue jays, red birds, a blue
birds. And we’ve got a finch feeder. Marilyn just put finch feeders out there for them
today. And doves, big doves and the little dove. One of my big objections is the way the
Audubon Society and everybody else talks about the Southern Mocking Bird. They
ought to name the thing the American Nightingale. That’s what they ought to do, but
they don’ t you know. They write that all it does is mock other birds with just now and
then a phrase of it’s own put in. That’s not the way it is. Mocking bird doesn’t sing the
same song every day like other birds. It’s the rooster that’s singing while the old lady is
sitting on the eggs in the nest. They’ve got plenty to eat, and he’s as happy as he can be.
He’ll sit out here right next…I’ve got a tape of him somewhere, and you’ve never heard
such singing in your life! He’d jump up and turn a somersault and land back on top of the
pine tree. It’s just a marvel to watch them and listen to them! But to say that it just
mocks other birds; I’ve heard people say that, “Oh it just mocks other birds”; that’s not
so. That’s not the way it is at all! I can’t get the world educated as hard as I try!
MR. JOYNER’S DAUGHTER: Daddy, go back to the woods; back at Trader’s Hill and
back around there and the holler.
MR. JOYNER: Oh lord, yeah! Everybody had his own holler, they pronounced it h-o-l-l-
e-r, “holler”, a woods holler. He’d be around the house somewhere, and pretty soon
he’d be way back in the back woods over there. And he’d go “Day, Day, Daaaayaooo”
and things like that you know! [Demonstrating a field holler that a person would make]
And you could hear it for two miles! We went to a house one time and asked for this
young woman’s husband. She said that he was right back there in the fields, “I heard him
holler just a few minutes ago”. So we knew where he was and we could drive down there
and find him. That was the purpose of it; to let you know, “Here I am”, or “I’m
coming!” Everybody had his own. Some of them were real pretty. Some were not. But
most of them had a melodious sound that they made.
MR. GENTRY: Did you have one?
MR. JOYNER: I couldn’t have one because my mother got the idea one time that I had
adenoids and she carried me down to a doctor’s office. He put me on the table and put
me to sleep with what we called in those days “laughing gas”. And I dreamed I saw a
little colored girl about six inches high on the horizon. Over there, just dancing up a
breeze! I was right on a cliff. All of a sudden I fell off that cliff and put my hands up and
got them in something and crawled back up of the cliff where the girl was dancing on the
horizon over there. It was just so funny to me. I just started laughing. And when I came
to, I woke up on the table there; the doctor said he’d had kind of a time with me. He said
I fell off of the table and got back up on it and just went to laughing like everything. He
said that he expected to have that with the gas. But I think that must be the way the gas
works or something. It gives you something to laugh at.
MR. GENTRY: Well, what I want to hear is what that holler sounded like. You may
remember one from somebody.
MR. JOYNER’S DAUGHTER: You know, the Chessers, the Mosells. You know that
tape that we’ve got?
MR. JOYNER: Yeah but that was just driving cattle, “HEYYYYY-HE” and
“HOOOOO-HE”! Like that, you know. Just keeping your cows going, just knowing
that you’re back there, and keep going. So that’s all there was to that.
MR. GENTRY: What about your signals to a mule or a horse?
MR. JOYNER: Well, just “Gee” and “Haw” and “Whoa” and “Get up” or whatever.
[Makes a tooth and tongue clicking sound] All you had to do. I had a bridle one time and
the old bits just wore out. So I just took the bridle off of the horse and hung them up on
the haines and went on plowing just talking to her. I’d get to the end of the row, if I said,
“Come in” she’d come to the left. If I said, “Come around”, she’d go to the right. And in
plowing her, if she was walking too far to the left, you could say, “Gee Molly” and she’d
step over, a little closer to the right you know. And if she was too close up and stepping
on your corn or whatever you could say, “Haw”, and she’d ease back out to the left. You
do that by just tapping on the rein when you’re plowing. You just say, “Haw” and tap
on that rein. You don’t turn her head like everybody tries to do. Like I say, I can’t
educate the whole world! If you just tap it, and by the time you say, “Haw” she’ll turn
her head that way, and just naturally step just a tad; that’s all you want her to do to keep
from covering up your corn and stuff. But that’s the way you controlled them, with Gee,
Haw, Whoa, Get Up, or Come in, Come around, back.
MR. JOYNER’S DAUGHTER: What was on that tape that we got from the National
Archives?